It’s the right thing to do.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/harvard-to-bring-up-to-40-of-undergrads-to-campus-this-fall/
apparently the gap year deadline has been extended to July 24th. happy waiting, everyone 
Here is the announcement: https://www.fas.harvard.edu/fas-coronavirus-updates
Check out the section “Implications for Spring”. Freshmen will be on campus in the Fall, but unclear what will happen in the Spring. Two of the three scenarios under discussion for the Spring indicate freshmen would not be on campus, and the third best case scenario doesn’t specify which cohort (besides seniors) would be invited back if things improve. I imagine that short of 100% being invited back, juniors and sophomores might have priority since they will not be on campus in the Fall.
Do you guys think more people will request gap years given the announcement, the no tuition decrease and the VISA situation with international students?
Also here: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/7/6/harvard-college-coronavirus-fall-plans/
Major takeaways:
- Admissions are mostly done worrying about first years. They have 81%. July 24 is just to keep us in limbo longer. “…a special team of advisors” have been trained to advise “upperclassmen contemplating taking leaves of absence”.
- Stanford, Yale and Princeton all invited first years. To stay competitive, H has no choice. Max 40% = 2,700 kids on campus with 1,600 first years, 0 faculty.
- Only 250 quarantine beds at UHS - less than 10% of returning undergrads. Safe to assume if 10%+ get infected, then everyone will be sent home again, like in March.
- “All courses will be taught virtually for students both on and off campus… Inter-House access to other residences and dining areas, as well as to non-residential Harvard buildings, will be restricted…”
- Lucky returning kids not qualified for financial aid will be paying $80,000 a year to enjoy super-fast wi-fi for “Harvard Online” in their single rooms or large, nearly empty, lecture halls for 4-6 hours a day, 5 days a week. No sports events, no concerts, no social activities, not even on weekends.
Can’t help but ask what are their priorities? Faculty safety? Upperclassmen safety? Or, Endowment safety? Isolating the youngest and most emotionally vulnerable among all students into an aggressively social-distanced environment with no in-person human contact with faculty, older kids or other non-pod peers, feels wrong. This fall marks the very first time most kids have left home to live on their own. For some 200 international students, this is the first time to live 5 to 16 hours of time-zones away from home. Does it make sense to use them as guinea pigs to test-run if this in-person experiment works during an escalating second-wave COVID pandemic?
“Nearly 45 percent of surveyed students reported they were very likely to take a leave in the case of a virtual semester, according to an Undergraduate Council poll run in April.” If that’s also true with the incoming first years, everyone on this wait list blog will get accepted! But no, we are just the ultimate back-up maybes. Our sanity and mental health stand lower than that of incoming first years. Such hypocrisy with the adults about how much they do care…
@NascarFedex Any thoughts from you or your “Harvard Online” kids?
@waitlistedsenior Looks like the US government just announced for schools doing “all online” fall such as Harvard, all international students must leave if on US soil now, or face deportation. If already home, stay there as Border Control won’t let them in.
And let’s see what NCAA and Ivy League decide (they said this Wednesday). If fall/winter sports are a go, I am guessing those students will need to be on campus.
Of course, this comes out just after revealing their yield
I think what @giantoctopus is trying to say is that Harvard probably purposefully released their yield before releasing their fall plans since they’re anticipating an increase in gap year requests (and thus a lower yield). They probably wanted to report their yield earlier while it’s still above 80%.
@waitlistedsenior Got it, thanks! Does enrollment yield calc include wl kids? If it does, the yield won’t change much… I thought.
@LimboKid no yield doesn’t include WL enrolment. Yield takes into account out of the 1980 offers Harvard sent out in REA and RD, how many committed into class of 2024. H is probably worried about an influx or gap year requests which will lower yield.
@waitlistedsenior Are you sure? Help me out here. In the enrollment stats of previous years, I never saw any footnote or language saying that “WL was not included”, or “this final enrollment number is not used for yield calc because it included z-list and gap folks from last year and WL people”. They simply called it final yield: enrollment/offers.
Before it stopped announcing yield data, Stanford was actually honest in saying its final yield in September included gap, z and wl. If H is the same way, then gaps will be replaced by us wl kids. Remember how in late May, they took a handful of wl kids? They didn’t mention the wl figure (in or out) in the 81% yield calc a month later. The “offers” figure stayed the same… so strange. Do they never account for accepted wl figures in the yield? Are we sure?
In usual years, they announce yield before any waitlist activity even begins, which indicates that it’s just factoring in those who were made direct offers. The whole purpose of the waitlist is to fix the gaps in yield. It is likely that they don’t put it in calculations as they haven’t in previous years.
It’s a game just like spring and summer admit (they are considered rejected for fall), overseas starts at “partner universities” and placing them in specially colleges that have their own admissions but are on-campus (professional school/ night school or the undeclared colleges known as DUS/CGS. ITs a way of gaming the rankings of US news. This year this has messed it up
Is there a possibility that Harvard opens its first wait list again (students rejected in May and thereafter) and start offering seats to the locals?
I think Harvard would rather protect their image than do that. They will most likely not give offers to kids they’ve already rejected since there’s still a good amount of people left on their current waitlist.
BREAKING NEWS:
“As of late June, over three percent of students accepting spots in the Class of 2024 had deferred enrollment since the May 1 reply date.”
“Over the course of Monday, more than 60 rising freshmen students joined a Class of 2024 group chat dedicated to discussing gap years.”
Full Crimson article: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/7/8/harvard-coronavirus-fall-freshmen-reactions/
Assume 3.5% of May 1 commits had deferred enrollment as of late June, that’s 56 kids. Half was before end of May, half in June. That means they probably took two dozen off WL in the first wave. Now there are 20+ spots open. 60+ are currently thinking about gap year. Say, two thirds decided for it; that’s 40+ spots. Combined, we might be looking at a second/final wave around July 24 of taking 60+ kids off WL. Slim chances still if the WL now is ~700 (my guesstimate), but hope survives for a couple of more weeks, guys!
Other key comments from 2024 commits:
“They (H) want first-years on campus for the first couple of months in order to ease the transition to college life, but we can’t talk to upperclassmen because there will be no upperclassmen… We can’t really build personal connections with professors because everything is going to be online and it’s much harder to talk to them if everyone’s trying to access them in these small slots for virtual office hours. And then we can barely talk to our own classmates because of very restricted socialization rules.”
"The only common spaces that they (H) said will be open was the laundry room… It just doesn’t make any sense. The only place where we can talk to people is while doing laundry? What?”
Several universities have inexplicably closed their waitlist, despite the loss of international students. So, anything could happen.