<p>I doubt that Penn is the only Ivy where adcoms ponder where top students will matriculate. </p>
<p>Wasn’t there an embarrassing scandal involving some admissions officers at Princeton peeking online at the admission lists of Yale to see which students had said yes? Or was it the other way around?</p>
<p>^ I thought it was the Yalies. (I do remember the incident.)</p>
<p>We know a couple of first-hand stories about Ivy yield management. Lesson learned: don’t disclose to the media where you want to attend college should you be fortunate enough to win an award.</p>
<p>@jazzymom and epiphany: It was Princeton looking at Yale admissions.
[Yale</a> Daily News - Princeton officials broke into Yale online admissions decisions](<a href=“http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/4565?badlink=1]Yale”>http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/4565?badlink=1)
Princeton has the smallest classes out of HYP. Consequently statistical fluctuations, combined with the limited predictability of student preferences, pose a greater difficulty for them in assembling a “right-sized” freshman class.</p>
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<p>Ooh, never thought of that. Thanks for the tip, QuantMech.</p>
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Jumping in late, but this is not true at every school. At least back many years ago doing graduate admissions at architecture school, each reader read the application and put the rating (numbered 1-6) in an envelope without seeing what the other readers scores were.</p>
<p>I’ve heard admissions officers from the Ivy’s say that they might make different decisions on different days and certainly an essay that one person finds funny, may fall flat with another.</p>
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<p>Disagree on both points. Ivy schools are fiercely interested in their yield as evidenced by the incredible marketing they exert on their accepted applicants. And I believe Harvard has been taking in excess of 100 from the waitlist the past two seasons. Not sure on the others.</p>
<p>Count me in the camp that believes every school – HYP included – engages in some statistics-manipulation for the sake of rankings (yield, selectivity, etc.) and to trump their closest competitors. Harvard is an example, although I’m sure every school has its methods. How else to categorize Harvard’s significant underadmission of freshman students for two years running now? (200+ came off the waitlist last year and 100+ this year.) Yes, I understand that the elimination of its early program created some uncertainty for Harvard’s admissions office last year, but still, couldn’t they have done a little better job of predicting yield then, especially as it became clear that for the most part, Y and P were going to match its new financial aid initiative for middle-class kids? And what about this year? Was admitting too few students a conscious effort to keep the percentage admitted artificially low? I don’t know the answer to that question, but it’s possible. Even the biggest boys have competitors. It’s unfair to attribute cynical motives to some schools and not others, IMO.</p>
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<p>Here is my cynical theory regarding Georgetown and Northwestern: they both waitlisted him, anticipating that they might not have been his top choices. He normally would have been accepted off the waitlist if he expressed interest, but both schools were already over-enrolled and so neither was able to take him off the waitlist, hence why they each offered him priority for a transfer.</p>
<p>I remember Stanford releasing a statement this year stating how they are controlling their freshman enrollment (as previous years had overenrollment or something like that, resulting in housing issues) by admitting fewer kids and putting more on the waitlist. They admitted an unprecedented number of kids from the WL this year (no complaints here as a waitlist admittee 
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