Yes, super selective universities are all subject to the possibility of over enrollment. They surely have over-flow capacities to absorb certain amount of over enrollment. But their degree of freedom will be much smaller than say a state university that places over enrollment in nearby hotels. Can you imagine Harvard or Yale places their students outside of their houses and residential colleges? I do not see that to be a viable choice.
As a result, when they over enroll in one year, they would have to be very careful about their enrollment management possibly into the next 3 years because that over enrollment may stay with the university for the entire 4 years; I believe a very high percentage of Harvard students live in their houses for the entire 4 years. This is the reason why Harvard has to accept fewer students this coming year and use its wait list, and also maybe continue to do so in the following two years, to digest the past year’s over enrollment, and have some of them move from over-flow housing units back to regular housing units starting next year.
@prof2dad - I think complaints about Harvard’s food and housing are pretty common, even a point of pride. (“This is the actual room where Scrooge McDuck brushed his feathers and has not been cleaned or updated since 1920!”)
At MIT, they’ve dealt with periodic over-enrollment by screwing graduate students out of housing that gets reassigned to undergrads. I love nearly everything about MIT but not this. Oh, I guess there was also a period in the early 1990s when they rented a residence hall down near Northeastern and got a shuttle.
Apparently, MIT’s “Senior House” dorm is now going to be closed and reopened as a graduate student dorm, which is a long time in coming since they converted several grad dorms into undergrad. But it will tighten the undergrad housing situation so I wonder if we’ll see any yield/over-enrollment issues there.
ETA: of course, also, any announcement of over-enrollment has a bit of the humble-brag: “oh dear, we were more popular than we could have imagined!”
Overenrollment might be irritating to the families of the entering class, but notice that the top schools never end up UNDER-enrolling (as they would now and then if this were a truly random thing). Admissions dept’s use “overenrollment” announcements to signal how popular they are. I’m never really convinced that these are genuine “oopsies”.
You can try to predict yield, using various factors. But you can’t make it hit your goal exactly. Under-enrollment can be handled by going to wait list. Or some colleges extend deadlines.
In the long run, H having extra kids isn’t the end of the world. Dorming isn’t the only thing that makes the college experience, especially at a tippy top. What I wonder about all those kids who do get wait listed and now think they have some special chance of getting a later admit.
Renovation is a good thing. It surely introduces substantial impacts on student housing. I think parents and students would understand.
In contrast, it will be harder to explain to parents and students if the reason is oops in admission management.
I did hear some things about Harvard housing situation from my S who was kindly hosted at one of Harvard houses when he attended The Game last year. Because this is Harvard’s forum, I will behave very nicely it here.
Harvard students will be the first to admit that some housing options are better than others. I’m sure the same can be said for almost every university. That said, I doubt that any members of the Class of 2021 turned down an offer because they would have to live in overflow housing. :))
I do like how Harvard spins the advantages of living in overflow housing:
Overenrollment is an issue at Harvard, Yale, and any college that has a designed freshman experience. I’m not surprised that no one turned them down when they found out they wouldn’t be living in traditional freshman housing – although, come to think of it, we don’t know that to be true, maybe some people did – but part of what makes Harvard special is that it has provided a high-quality freshman experience consistently for decades, and hasn’t cheapened it by over-admitting and stashing people in forced triples, common rooms, or closets. Yale wanted to expand its class size by a couple hundred kids, to get closer to Harvard’s or Brown’s size, and it spent half a billion dollars to build the additional dorm space that would require to a standard equal to the existing dorms.
Waitlists are absolutely a strategic element. No one wants to leave a legitimate slot empty, and it’s impossible to hit the right yield on the nose. So you under-admit, then use the waitlist to fill the remaining slots. That’s more or less what everyone used to do. The epidemic of overenrollment this year suggests that something has changed.
The waitlist threads will be insane. Everyone waitlisted will read the comment from the Dean of Admissions and think that there are 100 Golden Tickets off the waitlist out there and what can they do to insure that their name is on one of them instead of focusing on the great schools they have in hand.
@prof2dad Freshmen are in freshmen housing at Harvard then they are in the same house for sophomore to senior. And some freshman are already in housing away from Harvard Yard (Pennypacker, Hurlbut, etc). Some of upperclass houses are much farther away. It’s all tradeoffs in proximity, room size, avoiding tourists, etc.
^^ My guess is that Harvard’s overall SCEA acceptance rate will be about the same as in previous years. That’s because no matter how many SCEA student’s Harvard accepts, the predicted yield for SCEA Admissions is thought to be much higher (probably closer to 100%), as students are showing demonstrated interest by applying early. And Harvard gets to court those SCEA accepted students for four months with emails, snail mail and phone calls from the Admissions Office, current students and alumni. Whereas the RD yield is more unpredictable. SO, IMHO, Admissions will take about the same number of SCEA students, but fewer RD students and place more students on the waitlist from the RD round and wait to see how it all shakes out come May 1st.
