If I remember correctly, @Penn95, you’re an engineering grad. I find it’s usually the science/engineering/entrepreneurial types who assume that everyone who applies to Harvard will apply to Stanford, and vice versa.
There are plenty of top students who will apply to Harvard and not Stanford precisely because they think Stanford is too STEM-my and Californian, and plenty who will apply to Stanford and not Harvard because they think Stanford is the tech-y Silicon Valley future and Harvard’s the frozen past. I know many tiptop East Coast prep school kids who aren’t planning on applying to Stanford; they think it’s not for people like them (particularly if they’re non-STEM-focused) and they don’t like the odds anyway. A lot of them will end up at HYP, and I think Stanford would have liked to have had a shot at them.
The thing is, if you apply SCEA somewhere and get in, there’s probably an 80-90% chance you enroll (even accounting for kids who throw in vanity RD apps to other schools). Stanford knows this, I think, and doesn’t want to miss out on a lot of kids who just write them off and play the SCEA odds at HYP.
I think my son was the exception to all that you mention in your above post, @DeepBlue86. He was a “top” student (got into all of his schools including MIT, Princeton, Penn, Caltech, Mudd, Vandy, WUSTL and three safeties) who didn’t apply to Stanford or Harvard. He was accepted SCEA to Princeton, and chose to attend MIT.
the Stanford SCEA admit rate is a lot higher than its RD admit rate so there is an advantage to applying early. top students will continue to apply to Stanford early because of this advantage… despite HYP being easier to getting into with their higher EA rates.
I doubt Stanford is at all concerned about their low EA rate in terms of losing students to other schools… and no I don’t think Stanford had any sinister plan to get more applicants by not announcing EA results… or saw a drop in applicant caliber or the other theories. If anything not announcing will drive down apps not increase… which is consistent with their having the highest app fee and essay requirements to cull the number of applicants.
btw…the school where EA does not offer a statistical advantage is MIT… .so if you’re going to use your bullet wisely it’s best to go for HYP along with S to a lesser degree first and apply to MIT latter as RD.
personally I don’t think it matters to folks applying to MIT… they want to go there and will apply early anyway.
Well, the admit rate at MIT for EA actually is a couple of percentage points better than for RD (10% vs 8%, I believe). But, you’re right – it’s not huge.
Btw, some MIT coaches encourage their recruited athletes to apply early to show their commitment – that is, they’ve used their early “bullet” on MIT rather than to apply SCEA to any of HYPS. Since MIT is Div III and athletes don’t get the same bump in admissions at MIT as at many schools, this may add credibility to the coach’s support.
Same goes for all other MIT applicants, I guess, but perhaps to a lesser extent. Because there is no big EA bump, if you apply to MIT early (forgoing HYPS), it means that you REALLY want to attend. It’s a form of demonstrated interest, and may explain, in part, why MIT’s yield is so high (about 75%) without SCEA or ED.
@DeepBlue86 You might think there are a slew of kids who want to go to any of HYPS, and there are, and those are the ones that don’t get admitted. Those superstars who have a real chance of getting in want to go to Stanford for X,Y or Z reasons (or Harvard or Princeton or Yale) which are usually specific to the school. They want to study under a specific program or professor, most of the prestige chasers end up at a match or safety.
Of course students whose first choice is clearly Stanford and think they’ve got a good chance of admission are going to apply early there. But there are many, many tippy-top students who prefer one or more of HYP, or who don’t love Stanford so much that they’re willing to risk being shut out. I think Stanford wants to have a a shot at as many of these kids as possible - I certainly would, if I were in Stanford’s position - and that means not discouraging them by letting apps grow to the point that it looks like it isn’t worth applying. You seem to think these people don’t exist in significant numbers (because, I think, you just don’t believe that there are lots of tippy-top kids who have all sorts of reasons to prefer someplace else over Stanford).
Once again, I will say: we agree that Stanford seems to want to keep apps down (through not announcing SCEA results, keeping app fees a little above the competition, having supplemental essays, etc.). Why would that be? I think most people would find my explanation (that the rapid increase in apps is disproportionately made up of types of applicants that Stanford doesn’t need any more of, and is starting to scare off some other kinds of applicants that they really want a shot at) more convincing than yours (Stanford’s just modest). Again, why else would Stanford care how many apps they got - they could always pocket the fees and hire more readers. There’s something that’s making them want to keep a lid on it.
I beg to differ. I agree that at the margin most superstars looking for a top-tier liberal arts university (as opposed to a LAC or MIT/Caltech) are going to have a preference for one of HYPS - that’s how they choose the one which will become their SCEA app. That said, I think most of them would be a lot happier attending any one of them than someplace else. Undoubtedly some are looking to work with some specific professor in some program at one of them, but that, in my experience is a small minority, and if they don’t get into the one they want, they’re quite happy at any of the others (which, after all, are pretty fabulous across the board). And plenty of them get in to at least one, in my experience. I can’t prove this, any more than you can prove your assertions, but that’s what I see.
I guess the fact that Harvard has lower app fess and no essay requirements… along with counting incomplete apps… means that Harvard is looking for more of the students that Stanford is scaring off:) yeah… not buying it.
Two different things, @sbballer - Harvard wants more first-gens, who tend to be lower-SES and more likely to apply if there are fewer requirements. It’s hard to find the best ones, and can be hard to keep them on the right trajectory once they’re there. Harvard wants to reduce the obstacles. They might also be trying to gin up more apps because they don’t want to fall too far behind Stanford, for marketing reasons, but I think landing first-gens is the primary goal.
Stanford, on the other hand, has a much more deeper historic relationship with the Latino and Native American populations by virtue of its location and history, so has an easier time attracting first-gens. They also get more through athletic recruiting than the Ivies, I think. On the other hand, Stanford gets far too many apps overall, and a lot of them are in categories where they have more than enough supply.
Stanford doesn’t get much incremental marketing benefit from another few thousand apps; it just makes an East Coast future English major, for example, think that as good as Stanford’s English department may be, HYP have equally good ones, they’re closer to home, she won’t be surrounded by Californian engineering majors making her feel like a stepchild, and she might actually stand a chance of getting in, so she’ll use her SCEA bullet at one of those schools, thank you very much.
Once more, I’ll ask (not that I expect it to do any good): do you really think Stanford wants to hold app numbers down because Stanford is modest, or is it because at this point growth in the kind of apps they’re getting hurts more than it helps?
@sbjdorlo Yeah, my MIT numbers were off the top of my head and were from a couple of years ago, when my kid applied. Sorry about that. The numbers have shifted down since then. Here is what one can glean for the MIT class of 2021:
7.8% were admitted EA
71% of EA pool was deferred to RD cycle
10.5% of EA pool was ultimately admitted
4.7% of those that applied only during RD cycle were admitted
4.4% of total RD pool (including EA deferrals) was admitted
So, if one wants to compare the ultimate outcome of the EA pool to those that applied only during the RD cycle, the valid numbers are 10.5% vs 4.7%. Roughly double. Lots of successful EA applicants simply have to wait until the RD cycle to learn about their fate. My kid was one of those.
Btw, I can only get your 6.6% RD number if I take the total admitted during RD including EA deferrals (781) and divide by the number of RD applicants excluding EA deferrals (11834). That’s not valid. The total RD pool is actually 17800.
harvard is looking to boost app numbers… nothing to do with first generation low income applicants which every university including Stanford wants. I doubt there is any sinister reason for Stanford not announcing EA numbers… and no I doubt they are worried about losing candidates to other schools because of low EA numbers.
that’s interesting about deferrals and EA rates… so MIT does offer an advantage to EA based on this info. didn’t realize that MIT did a lot of deferrals… along the lines of HYP. Stanford I believe only defers about 12% from EA… but based on raw numbers there is still a healthy advantage to applying SCEA over RD with deferral admissions offering a boost.
Whatever makes you feel better, @sbballer ;). We agree Stanford clearly wants to reduce or slow the growth in the number of apps it’s getting. You’d think that they’d love to see as many apps as possible, to increase the number of kids from which they can pick. But apparently they don’t, and you think it’s for the novel reason that they’re tired of crowing about how they get more apps than anywhere else. It couldn’t possibly be that they don’t want another few thousand apps from international Silicon Valley wannabes, because that would make the place look even more lopsided and impossible to get into for some other kinds of kids they want to attract. If this were true, it would mean that, in at least one respect, Stanford wasn’t perfect for everyone everywhere, and we can’t believe that, can we?
“4.7% of those that applied only during RD cycle were admitted
4.4% of total RD pool (including EA deferrals) was admitted…”
So, if you go on MIT website and do a little calculation it shows that RD applicants had a 4.7% admit rate while deferred EA had only 3.8% admit rate. Though only about 18% difference in admit rate there is an appreciable penalty for applying EA. If an applicant is not admitted in EA at MIT there seems to be a scarlet letter effect on the application file which has a negative impact during RD. Here I am assuming there is no difference in the quality of EA deferrals and the large RD pool. Many EA schools suggest EA pool is much stronger than RD pool even for the deferred.
true but MIT already admitted the cream of the crop during EA… haven’t gone through all the assumptions but a 3.8% admit rate after already admitting the choice students is actually good. EA seems to offer an advantage not a penalty in this case.
@jzducol Certainly, at MIT it’s better to be admitted during the EA round than to be deferred. The odds go down markedly. But I disagree that there is an “appreciable penalty for applying EA” – 10.5% of EA applicants are ultimately admitted, compared to just 4.7% for those that wait until the RD round. Based strictly on those numbers, one has a much better shot applying EA than waiting until RD.
Of course, as you pointed out, the strength of the EA pool may overall be much stronger than the pool of applicants that wait for the RD round. This issue exists when comparing “early” vs “regular” admission stats for any university.
It also could be that – on the other tail of the bell curve – many in the deferred group are weaker than the weakest of those that apply RD. Obviously, if MIT rejected more of the weakest applicants during the EA round, then the pool of deferred applicants would be stronger overall, and the 0.9% difference in acceptance rate that you noted could disappear or flip.
After reading through the last few hundred posts on this thread, I’ve reached the conclusion that Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and Chicago have competitive admissions.