<p>It’s a good strategy if your kid is not the kind who’ll think “Maybe if I had applied to tippy-top U I would have gotten in. Now, I wish I’d tried.” I’ve known a lot of kids like that. Every December we see them on CC boards too: “I didn’t think I’d have a good shot at the very top schools, so I applied ED to Brown/Columbia/Penn etc. I got in. Now, I’m thinking I underestimated my chances and I’d like to try for HYPS. I’m not applying for fin aid. Is there a way to get out of my early decision commitment?”</p>
<p>Benley: What you report about Naviance is consistent with my point. Harvard values SAT II and AP scores more highly that other colleges. Which necessarily means that it relies less on SAT I and GPA, at least relative to the weights accorded those inputs by other colleges. That’s an idiosyncrasy that’s worth noting.</p>
<p>Hunt: I don’t claim that Yale’s admission decisions have any effect at all on Harvard’s decision, but I’m not relying on purely subjective belief, either. My proposition would be that if you have very similar decisionmakers applying very similar selection criteria to very similar (indeed, substantially overlapping ) pools, you are going to wind up with very similar decisions. Not a profound insight.</p>
<p>^ In the absence of consideration for other critical factors- generally the institutional and campus community needs, the various balances they seek.</p>
<p>"Every December we see them on CC boards too: “I didn’t think I’d have a good shot at the very top schools, so I applied ED to Brown/Columbia/Penn etc. I got in. Now, I’m thinking I underestimated my chances and I’d like to try for HYPS. I’m not applying for fin aid. Is there a way to get out of my early decision commitment?” </p>
<p>But really, how can anyone not be turned off by such an attitude? You got into one of the very top schools in the country and it’s not enough for you? I would have a very hard time mustering up any sort of sympathy or empathy for a kid who says something like that. Good lord, you got the brass ring, you won the lottery, whatever – buy your t-shirt and revel in your good fortune.</p>
<p>It may raise YOUR estimation of the probability (or it may not – depends on your overall attitude towards such things and to what extent you think one is a harbinger of the other). It doesn’t raise the ACTUAL probability, because H’s decision-making is an independent event to Y’s and the decision was made prior to your checking the first portal and finding out your decision.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, you know that’s wrong. If you are in the hospital, and one nurse comes in an takes your temperature using an oral thermometer, and another comes in five minutes later and takes your temperature using a rectal thermometer, there is very likely to be a correlation between the two measurements, notwithstanding that they were done by different people, acting independently, at different times using different equipment. The fact is, they are different people with the same training, measuring the same thing on the same person at almost the same time, and with fundamentally similar equipment. Their absolute readings may differ because of the technology, but their interpretation of those readings relative to a norm (do you have a fever or not? how bad?) is not likely to differ at all.</p>
<p>College decisionmaking isn’t as unidimensional as simply reading a thermometer, of course. It won’t have the same degree of inter-rater reliability. But fundamentally, you have two different groups of very similar people judging the same applicant based on almost identical criteria at the same time. If they don’t reach similar judgments, something’s wrong. And, of course, they take the same action in the vast majority of cases – i.e., usually both Harvard and Yale reject any applicant who applies to both. But I think that both accepting a candidate is the second-most common outcome, more frequent than a split decision. (I am deliberately ignoring waitlisting as an separate category here.)</p>
<p>Huh. Interesting. Isee your point. I guess I don’t really have a point of view to feel like I can answer – given the pool of common H/Y applicants (where the most common outcome is reject both), whether the second-most common outcome is accept both vs a split decision.</p>
<p>Just looking at the data from my own kid’s HS it is MUCH more common to have a kid accepted to one of HYP than to have a kid accepted at all three. (Of course having a kid rejected from all three is the most common outcome of all.)</p>
<p>What is MUCH more likely is that a kid who is accepted to one of HYP is highly likely to be accepted to every other college he or she applies to- with obvious “Tufts-syndrome” like outcomes (a kid accepted to Princeton, Chicago, Penn, Columbia but rejected from Brandeis and wait-listed at Tufts).</p>
<p>Whether the data looks different if you just look at kids who apply to H and Y and don’t bother with P I don’t know- this particular school either has kids who apply to one of them or all three. I do recall a kid in my son’s class who applied to P and Y because he was a multi generational legacy at Harvard, and accepted at both P and Y where he had no obvious tips or hooks other than being an awesome student and generally wonderful, kind and modest person. His friends thought he was nuts for not "using"his legacy advantage.</p>
<p>There is actually a way to find out how many students get into more than one of HYP by looking at the yield rates. The yield rates this year are 82% for Harvard, and 67% for Princeton. It seems like the yield rate for Yale isn’t out yet, but last year’s yield rate was 68%. So if you assume that everyone who gets into HYP attends HYP (which is definitely not true) and that all schools accept the same number of people (which is pretty much true), on average, anyone who gets into at least one of HYP gets into 1.4 of HYP. Adding in MIT and Stanford, you get that the average person who gets into at least one of HYPSM gets into about 1.6 of the five schools. And since we’re not talking about people who get rejected from all five, but there are people who get accepted to all five, the majority of people who get into HYPSM get into just one of the five schools.</p>
<p>I’m not sure if most people who apply to at least one of HYPSM only apply to one, but I don’t really think that’s true.</p>
<p>More like you have two different docs come in to assess you. Each gets your stats- and some consistent info from the patient. Do you get an identical diagnosis, right then and there? Does how you describe your complaint matter? Not stats from two types of thermometers. Remember the subjective. </p>
<p>And, it’s identical data- but for colleges., not identical needs. Like, maybe one doc is eval’ing you for a project at Mayo and the other for MSK.</p>
<p>My son only applied to Yale. He had absolutely no interest in either H or P. Having said that, he did meet quite a few kids at BDD who had just come from Princeton and were about to go to Harvard. Anecdotal. :)</p>
<p>Penn is well known for boosting legacies ED. </p>
<p>In my big sample of one when my oldest was asked by the Harvard interviewer straight out why he hadn’t applied SCEA he said “Because it’s not my first choice.” Harvard took him anyway and since it wasn’t his first choice he went elsewhere. (Oh and fwiw my son’s AP scores and SAT II scores were perfect, so perhaps that was a plus.) He applied to HMS and only got into H. But I’d say at our high school it’s very common to get into 2 or 3 of the HYPSM list. </p>
<p>I don’t think H spends a lot of time on yield management - they don’t need to.</p>
You can compare the actual rates for cross admit choices at [Compare</a> Colleges: Side-by-side college comparisons | Parchment - College admissions predictions.](<a href=“Compare Colleges: Side-by-side college comparisons | Parchment - College admissions predictions.”>Compare Colleges: Side-by-side college comparisons | Parchment - College admissions predictions.) . For example, 64% chose Stanford over Princeton, and 61% chose MIT over Princeton. Some of the numbers may be surprising to many on here, such as 40% choosing U Mass: Amherst over Harvard . That’s a similar cross admit ratio to H/Y and better than H/S or H/P. Many students choose non-HYPSM over HYPSM, which makes it quite awkward to try to estimate number of apps selected as in the post above.</p>
<p>Right, those estimates aren’t very exact. But taking into account the fact that some students choose non-HYPSM over HYPSM, the average number of acceptances only decreases. This just further shows that the majority of students who get into at least one of HYPSM get accepted to only one.</p>
<p>Actually, many students DON’T choose non-HYPSM over HYPSM. At least as of a few years ago, the number of students accepted to Harvard or Yale who wound up at none of HYPSM was probably fewer than 200 total, and if you add the other Ivies you would have gotten below 100. (I figured this out based on some decent cross-admit data; don’t ask me to replicate it.) </p>
<p>Mollie gave info for MIT one year, too. There were only four colleges other than the Ivies and Stanford that took 10 or more cross-admits from MIT: Caltech, Georgia Tech, Berkeley, and Michigan. Fewer than 10% of MIT’s admits went anywhere other than an Ivy or Stanford.</p>
<p>Maybe there really has been a change over the past few years, but in the past the notion that lots of kids turned down actual HYPS admissions to go to public universities or LACs in any great number was urban folklore. Sure, it happened – and there were examples on CC – but generally it was students who got some kind of full-ride merit scholarship to a very good college, and there just aren’t so many of those (and they don’t all apply to HYPS or get accepted if they do).</p>
<p>JHS, it is my perception that “prestige” counts for more with the current generation than with my generation, which may explain the outcomes you mentioned in #236. Perhaps this is only true regionally, in my area. Perhaps it is a question of the economy, or changes in demographics that make top schools seem more appealing.</p>
<p>It depends how you define “many.” Harvard had a 82% yield with a class of 1665. This only leaves 300 cross admits who didn’t choose Harvard. With only 300 students, you aren’t going to get huge numbers in any category. But the matchups I linked earlier suggest among the ~300 cross admits who did not go to Harvard, the 2nd most common choice after Yale was U Chicago (the listed confidence interval can be used to estimate number). While most of the other individual schools outside of YPSM have few cross admits who did not choose Harvard, the sheer number of non-YPSM schools is large, resulting in what I’d expect to be a significant portion of the 300. It’s a similar story with MIT. They had a yield of 73% and a class size of 1100, leaving less than 200 cross admits who did not choose MIT. If 9% of those accepted to MIT did not attend Ivy + Stanford, that means approximately half of the cross admits who did not choose MIT, favored a non-Ivy/Stanford. </p>
<p>There are numerous reasons why one might choose a less selective school, the most obvious being cost. If you are can get into Harvard, odds are you can get an excellent scholarship to a less selective school. Others have more unique reasons. For example, I had a relative who turned acceptance from a highly selective ivy because she thought the students on campus didn’t seem friendly when she visited. There is a post on CC where a student mentions not considering Princeton because she didn’t like the tour guide’s shoes. One could list countless other examples.</p>
(Oh and fwiw my son’s AP scores and SAT II scores were perfect, so perhaps that was a plus.) He applied to HMS and only got into H. But I’d say at our high school it’s very common to get into 2 or 3 of the HYPSM list. </p>