<p>Applying to Harvard is ABSOLUTELY NOT a lottery ticket. At least don’t tell the admissions officers that during your interview, there would be little more you could say to tee them off. </p>
<p>And secondly, what a writer thinks is a good applicant, or frankly what you read in the CC decisions threads and you think is a good student (2400, 4.0) are WORLDS apart from what the officers have spent their blood, sweat and tears picking. Most everyone here thinks the pool is a majority of flawless applicants. How any 2400/Val’s are given each year to high schoolers? So many that I bet there is a serial killer in jail who is a 2400/val. It’s like comparing a PhD guy/girl to Bill Gates (think about that for a moment).</p>
<p>You missed my point about the lottery ticket - going in you know that only 1500 or so applicants out of the 37,000 can be selected. You know you don’t have a “hook” - it is a long shot that you will be successful. However, the one absolute that you do know - if you don’t send your application in, you will not be accepted. </p>
<p>I also understand the pressure on the admissions office to select the best candidates that will be the future alums. They want students that will be successful academically and remain all four years. That makes them look good. </p>
<p>BTW - it is momma talking about purchasing the lottery ticket! I didn’t raise an idiot - my son wouldn’t say that (and hasn’t) during an interview.</p>
<p>In this case, the incorrect numbers don’t come from the students, but from the admissions office, or the flack designated to put out as positive a story a possible.</p>
<p>Time after time, the early numbers are in error and the flacks never revise their press releases to present accurate information. In followup stories, they just cite their own incorrect earlier stories. </p>
<p>Yale (and occasionally Stanford) are chronic offenders on this score - often failing to revise admit numbers to account for people taken off the waitlist, or including as matriculants people who defer for a year and are not really members of the class showing up in September, or including as “applications” submissions which are not complete, or which have been withdrawn.</p>
<p>Fortunately, CDS forms (where filed in a timely manner) allow us to ferret out the “final” numbers. Not surprisingly, where errors persist, they are always in the direction of making the school look good - i.e., a lower admit rate, a higher yield rate, a more favorable cross-admit rate, etc.</p>
<p>That doesn’t make much sense, since most of the UCs received a ton more applications (upwards of 10,000). Stanford’s increased by fewer than 2,500. I think the more likely explanation of the increase is that Stanford began rolling out its full alumni interview program for the first time this cycle, engaging alumni to increase outreach in entire states and in other countries like UK. The increase likely would have been larger without the reinstated early programs at H and P.</p>
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<p>Well, not in Cambridge, but in the new Allston campus. Harvard has no qualms about putting its students kinda far off main campus, so why should Allston be any different? And hasn’t Harvard talked about expanding its incoming class before? Stanford has been doing it and talked about expanding even more, Yale is expanding by adding two new colleges, Princeton already underwent expansion and may be doing more, etc.</p>
<p>I don’t think the intentions of expansion have any bearing on the # applicants. The UCs could be shrinking their student bodies and still would see more applicants.</p>
<p>Also, Stanford isn’t expanding its campus to NYC in the foreseeable future (even if it did, it planned to increase # grad students, not undergrads). It has a partnership with a university in NYC, so it will probably offer students the option of studying abroad there. Stanford’s also been increasing its incoming classes for a few years now - going from 1650 to about 1700 (not including the 20-40 transfer classes each year). That’s why undergrads number about 7,000 now.</p>
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