<p>If you ask me (which I'm pretty sure no one will), less prestigious, historically less competitive schools are benefiting quite a bit from the common app. For schools with historically small applicant pools, the boost in prestige from getting many more applicants than they can accept is well worth having to hire an additional admissions officer or two.
However, HYP and company hardly need to boost their prestige, and I don't really see what's so great about Yale having an acceptance rate of 5.8 percent for students who didn't apply SCEA. For those schools, the swelling applicant pool seems like a really bad thing.</p>