<p>Since they accepted so many students early, will it be harder to get in RD this year? Then again, the extra people they accepted probably would have been deferred/accepted in previous years.</p>
<p>And remember that recruited athletes and other heavily hooked applicants make up a sizable chunk of early acceptances.</p>
<p>The number of acceptances have not changed for Stanford and Yale. The baseline may have changed a bit since each school now knows who is truly interested in them and not waiting around to apply to the other schools because they were not open. We have to say the admission format has not changed for either school (Yale did have fewer applicants but they are more focused on Yale this time around?). </p>
<p>As Redseven says, athletes and a few others have always gotten likely letters from Harvard and Princeton ahead of time (athletes in October, accomplished students, legacies, top URMs QB applicants etc probably in February to stop them from committing to competition). So although it might look like a large number of seats are taken, a chunk are in a way were normally given out ahead of time without public knowledge.</p>
<p>But they aren’t going to suddenly increase a lot more recruited athletes this year. However, in general, they admitted a lot more students early.</p>
<p>Harvard and Princeton have about about 12% athletes, 13% legacies, 10% african americans, 10% hispanics, etc each year. If you say most of the athletes are already recruited, that took 170 slots and if most of the legacies were told to apply early and got accepted, that is another 170 or more slots. Harvard was emphasizing that they were able to recruit 10% each of african americans and hispanics to prove that their return to SCEA was not at the expense of diversity which means you could add another 140 seats to this number. So you tell me how many seats were regular admits?</p>