<p>Minute differences in percentages have nothing to do with the proportion of students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. </p>
<p>Especially figures on the percentage of students from private or parochial schools, given that many students at private and parochial schools attend on scholarship, and come from more urban areas that are far less wealthy than their public school counterparts from ultra-rich suburbs like Winnetka. </p>
<p>Or even the percentage who get financial aid, given that the average financial aid grant will vary depending on whether you look at the average, 25/75 percentile or median amount. This figures can be manipulated by the colleges, i.e., a college could give small grants to a larger number of relatively well-off students to compensate for the fact that it does not draw as many from truly disadvantaged backgrounds.</p>
<p>In other words, statistics are simply not compiled on this. You have to visit the Ivies over a period of a few days, talk with students and professors, sit in on the dining halls and roam the social scene in order to figure it out. Or you could take an academic approach and try to study it; one recent author did just that and determined that Columbia and Yale were the two most diverse Ivies. Princeton and Dartmouth are by far the least.</p>
<p>For additional analysis on what diversity really means, see:</p>
<p>I scoffed at the Princeton move (esp. explanation-- "our big competitor!") after Harvard's, but as one friend of mine now at harvard said, "Yale has to do something soon or it will look really student-greedy." I just hope the good minds over there can do something clever about it... maybe even one-up HP with some more reform.</p>
<p>Perhaps Yale could drop football, freeing up the 100 spots now reserved for mediocre students to make room for brilliant and promising applicants from the lowest economic quadrant.</p>
<p>Yale, like Harvard, has a non-binding early admissions program, so it is less of a big deal to drop it than for Princeton to abandon ED. The same legacies and other hooked candidates will still get into Harvard as before, only they may be forced to wait to find out. (But I would guess that pushy legacies will get a "nod" about their child's application in some manner before the April date.) I don't see how this changes anything about Harvard's admissions. What they need to do and have said they will do is more outreach and recruitment of disadvantaged students who might have been overlooked in the past. They always left room in the regular admissions cycle for those individuals disadvantaged by the early admissions process. But it is great PR for Harvard to be the leader in this movement. </p>
<p>Whether Yale follows or not, I certainly don't know. Perhaps Yale will come out with a statement that they are considering it -- and will wait to see how Harvard's test program works. I think Harvard said it will do away with SCEA for a few years to see how it works. I was surprised that Princeton abandoned its binding early application process.</p>
<p>Won't they take the yield hit anyway? Presumably, Yale doesn't want to drop EA because of the historically high yields from the EA admits (~90%), but now, a large number of EA applicants will be students who are applying to Yale EA, only to apply to Harvard and Princeton RD. The EA yield shouldn't hold from previous years, am I correct? </p>
<p>Yawn. Why bother? What really matters in terms of attracting a diverse class is A) the extent to which the school is already a magnet for socioeconomically diverse students, and B) the degree to which it recruits students by sending admissions officers all around. Yale is the leader in both areas.</p>
<p>Also, by having two rounds, a school such as Yale can look much more closely at applicants, allowing the admissions office to admit more low-income students who might not have the same SAT scores as a rich suburban applicant, but still might be as highly qualified. In other words, they have more time to look at things on a case by case basis. (Yale Law is the same way - it is by a huge margin the most selective law school, but also is the only major law school where professors, not some admissions committee, actually sit down and decide who to admit). Since Yale is easily the most selective university in the USA at the undergraduate level, with the lowest acceptance rate and the highest number of applications per spot, the admissions office would otherwise be somewhat overwhelmed.</p>
<p>Maybe the fact that Yale and Columbia are historically the two most socioeconomically diverse Ivies has something to do with them not ending early admissions yet. The other Ivies admit more by formula, since they get an overwhelmingly large number of applicants from rich suburbs and prep schools (yes Columbia and Yale have many students from non-public schools, but many of them are disadvantaged, either students who were on financial aid at private schools or those who attended urban parochial schools).</p>
<p>Remember, they can only admit so many from the early pool, since there is an unwritten rule that schools shouldn't (for tactical reasons) fill more than half the seats from the early pool, lest potential RD kids be discouraged from applying.</p>
<p>The advantage of SCEA is that you get to give the applicants "their first kiss" so to speak, and to retain exclusive negotiating rights to them for 90 days after admission.</p>
<p>It is for this reason that SCEA yield (at Harvard, Yale and Stanford) has been so high - between 88-92% --- as a so-called "reform" it is something of a fraud.</p>
<p>I grant that Yale's EA pool may be swollen by a certain number of kids whose preferred target is Harvard or Princeton, but who are throwing in a "what-is-there-to-lose EA application to Yale while they're waiting; in fact, Yale may be counting on this to provide a strategic edge.</p>
<p>But a certain amount of high-level "Tufts Syndrome" analysis should allow them to weed out those obviously ticketed for Cambridge or New Jersey, and the chance to give that "first kiss" to high SAT scorers, Intel winners, etc., will be quite tempting and potentially rewarding.</p>
<p>The great barrier to Yale's advancement in the academic pecking order - for years - has been the fact that it gets simply demolished in the cross-admit battle with Harvard. Levin may see the unilateral retention of an early program at a device to narrow the gap vs Harvard and widen a slight edge vs Princeton..</p>
<p>As I've noted above, it will allow them to focus more on socioeconomically disadvantaged applicants to an even greater degree than they already do.</p>
<p>Moreover, Yale relies on prep schools to a greater extent than any other Ivy, and awards financial aid to a smaller fraction of the class than does any other top elite. </p>
<p>This is because - in a Hobson's choice - the heavy reliance on the early pool (to fill 49% of the class and goose the yield rate) inhibits the recruitment of applicants from the lowest economic quadrant. It may be that going head-to-head with Princeton and Harvard in an almost certain "financial aid war" gives Levin pause. Yale is going to have to readjust its priorities and spend more of the endowment on financial aid.</p>
<p>If they are hesitant to surrender the EA crutch, they will almost certainly have to counter with a huge financial aid splash and hope that H & P don't fire back immediately.</p>
<p>Between the three of them, sooner or later, HYP should be able to outbid everybody else for the talented students of low and moderate income who are becoming a larger and larger frraction of the college age population..</p>
<p>Columbia and Yale are actually significantly more diverse. Your financial aid figures can be manipulated any way you choose, based on whether you look at average, median, or 25/75 percentile grants, a fact I've pointed out many times before. Students from private and parochial schools are not all necessarily wealthy - many come from urban parochial schools or attend private high schools on scholarship. These students overwhelmingly choose to go to colleges in urban areas like Columbia and Yale.</p>