I dislike these threads for a number of reasons- but mainly because to the “Inside Baseball” crowd (i.e. the long time posters) they are a combination of entertainment and a cheap form of gambling. But to the students who inevitably log on, every minute they spend engaging in game theory is a minute they are NOT spending finding a suitable match and safety school.
Most classes at Princeton are small enough so the “bulge” is likely to be undetectable. It’s other kinds of programs- nursing for example, already a shortage of nursing professors- where the flexibility to bulge one year and tailor down another year- would seriously challenge the institution.
A kid is in a 10 person philosophy seminar at Princeton. That 20% enrollment increase- yeah, two more students-- hardly impacts the educational experience.
I created this thread to be informative to incoming students, so I reject that premise completely.
Believe it or not, most students who really belong at the top-10 schools can handle both looking at reaches AND finding suitable match and safety schools.
Circling back on this since Harvard SCEA just came out. As I predicted, Harvard received a disproportionate number of the Princeton SCEA apps compared to say Yale.
Harvard’s SCEA apps went up by 57% over last year. And when that was coupled with a slightly lower number of SCEA acceptances, this resulted in Harvard’s SCEA rate plummeting from 13.9% to 7.4%.
In contrast, Yale’s SCEA apps went up by 38%, resulting in a smaller decrease in SCEA admit rate, from 13.8% to 10.5%. For the first time in at least 10 years our local school did better with Yale SCEA than Harvard SCEA.
“Believe it or not, most students who really belong at the top-10 schools can handle both looking at reaches AND finding suitable match and safety schools.”
That’s actually not the case, most kids, even the top ones focus way too much on the reaches, sure they’ll apply to safeties and matches, but don’t really think they’ll really attend one of them. Princeton’s EA applications are around 6K, maybe a little higher. It would have some impact in the ivies, maybe Stanford, MIT/Cal Tech, Chicago/NU/Duke a handful of schools. It’s not like UCLA saying they’re reducing class size, that would have an effect.