<p>Our family has no personal stake in Duke either, but certainly SOME of the hundreds of kids admitted to H and P and Penn from the waitlist initially committed to Duke – just take a look at the individual schools’ boards on CC for confirmation of that. You may be correct, Xiggi, that Duke’s decision to underadmit was in part a conscious effort to manipulate the numbers, to keep the percentage admitted artificially low. But when the biggest boy boys take nearly 400 from their waitlists, the entire food chain is affected, and Duke is one of the schools next in line down that chain. Surely they lost a large number of initially committed students to these schools. </p>
<p>Also, if you’re attributing statistics-manipulation to Duke, why not attribute it to Harvard as well – 200 taken off the waitlist there, too. I understand that the elimination of its early program created some uncertainty for Harvard’s admissions office this year, but couldn’t they have done a little better job of predicting yield, especially as it became clear that for the most part, Yale and Princeton were going to match Harvard’s new financial aid initiative. Was Harvard also motivated to announce a “gussied-up” admissions rate of 7.1%? I don’t know the answer to that question, but why attribute cynical motives to Duke and not to any other school? Even the biggest boys have close competitors. H wants to beat Y in the selectivity race and Y wants to beat S, etc.</p>