<p>Give me a break. The reason for going after the low yield, high achieving students is that institutionally Yale believes (a) it is the best university in the world, (b) it is competitive for the best students in the world, and (c) its faculty expect to be teaching the best students in the world. While the first may not be true, strictly speaking, the second and third points are certainly true. And they mean far, far more than the difference between a 97% graduation or retention rate and 98%.</p>
<p>The day Jeff Brenzel (or any Yale admissions dean) decides to pursue a strategy of accepting weaker students to boost yield should be his last day on the job.</p>
<p>And 60% is a great yield from top-scoring students who aren’t locked in (i.e., not counting other colleges’ ED admittees). I would bet that only Harvard does better with that group (and probably not a whole lot better).</p>
<p>Well the yield rate currently - which benefits substantially by filling half the class from the early pool - trails Stanford’s as well as Harvard’s, and is not much higher than MIT’s or Penn’s. </p>
<p>What will be interesting is to see whether Princeton’s overall yield rate will recover so as to match or exceed Yale’s due to it’s re-adoption of an early program. Princeton currently does better with top applicants, apparently, than its yield rate (without an early program) would lead you to expect.</p>
<p>"(a) it is the best university in the world,"</p>
<p>My British friends always remind me that the best university in the world is in Cambridge, not “the pretender on the east coast, but the original one across the little pond known as the Altantic” :-).</p>
<p>I don’t think Yale (or Harvard or Princeton) cares about yield as a statistic. I think they do care, though, about getting the students they want. Those aren’t the same thing. An early admissions program is part of the strategy a school can use to get the students it wants.</p>
<p>Well I think they very much care about yield - in that yield indirectly reveals a school’s relative success vs. rivals in the cross-admit wars; i.e., its ability to, as you say, “get the students it wants.”</p>
<p>Another fringe benefit of having a large early admit program is reducing the risk of cross-admit losses to rivals. Having a large early pool, with applicants barred from applying early elsewhere, from which a high fraction of the class is filled, effectively reduces the size of the cross admit pool shared with each or those rivals. This raises the yield rate several points … err, excuse me … helps the school “get the students it wants.”</p>
<p>I agree that Yale, Harvard, and Princeton worry about losing cross-admits. I just don’t believe that they care very much about the affect of their yield statistics on their US News rankings. As I said, those are two different things.</p>
<p>With all due respect, I don’t think they are “very different things” at all, especially when you are comparing one elite to another. </p>
<p>As long as they are not radically lowering standards to attract less qualified applicants, and as long as they are each others’ main competitors for top students, the open market yield rate and the cross-admit rate are essentially identical measures of success for the elites; i.e., the cross admit rate is a measure of their yield rate vs. their peer group.</p>
<p>^things change: the universities of Bologna or of Padua in italy were founded in the 11th/12th centuries. People like Copernicus, Dante Alighieri or Galileo Galilei have taught in these once best universities of the world. Don’t even check their ranking nowadays as it might well be below 200.
Who knows, the most active thread on CC when my children consider college will be the university of shanghai one?</p>
<p>The elites are, and have always been, far more concerned about their yield rate as an indicator of where they stand in the pecking order than with the app rate, regardless of what USNews may consider.</p>
<p>Of course the cross admit rate is even more critical, but this information is so sensitive that it seldom becomes public.</p>
<p>For the Class of 2011, when Princeton last had early admissions (binding early decision at that time), there were 2,275 applicants, of whom 597 were admitted.</p>
<p>Two-thirds of the total Y SCEA pool last year applied to P this year and we still haven’t heard the H SCEA numbers. Impressive showing for Duke ED as well with a 23% increase in applicants despite the reintroduction of H & P SCEA.</p>
<p>The early applicants to Y or other schools will not likely decrease just because H and P restored EA. It’s true that certain people changed their target, meanwhile more thought it might be their new opportunity to give a shot otherwise they might not even consider to try.</p>
<p>What has been happening in recent years is that first the elite prep schools, then the savviest public schools, and now virtually all schools where the guidance counsellors have a pulse have realized that virtually EVERY student aspiring to attend a top college absolutely MUST apply early … SOMEWHERE!</p>
<p>They do this because they realize - and increasingly the students realize - that early applicants have a substantial edge in the admissions process.</p>
<p>No counsellor or ambitious applicant with half a brain believes the nonsense spouted by admissions deans claiming that no such edge exists.</p>
<p>At most leading Ivy feeder schools - both public and private - the fraction of the senior class applying early SOMEWHERE is now approaching 100%.</p>
<p>Don’t tell me they all just “fell in love” with Penn or Williams, or Duke or Emory or whatever and reeely reeely want to go there in preference to all other schools.</p>
<p>It is this trend, which shows no sign of abating, that is causing early application numbers to surge virtually everywhere.</p>
<p>Nice conspiracy. What motivation or advantage do you see Yale obtaining by stating that this advantage does not exist when it does? Any bias would favor claiming an advantage when one did not exist to increase application numbers from marginal candidates. Have you ever seen Yale or Stanford post or quote objective admissions stats on successful SCEA candidates, excluding recruited athletes, that were lower than the successful RD pool? Me neither.</p>
<p>My bet is that Yale’s SCEA number will be about 4000 which is a significant drop from last year. If that number were true and Harvard numbers come in range with Yale/Princeton, then last year’s HYP SCEA pool will more than double this year even if 1/3 of Yale’s SCEA numbers defect elsewhere.</p>
<p>Here is a new story about 2016 Early Decision applicants at JHU, where the university is more straightforward than most of the Ivies (with the possible exception of Penn) about the admissions edge given to early applicants.</p>
<p>For a study demonstrating beyond any reasonable doubt that early applicants are everywhere held to a lower standard for admissions, even correcting for the recruited athletes and legacies in the early pool, see “The Early Admissions Game.”</p>
<p>I think you are comparing apples and oranges. This thread is on the new SCEA programs of H and P and my post refers to Y and S. There is a likelihood that virtually all ED programs give an admissions advantage as clearly stated in your above link. The student is giving up the flexibility of comparing options and FA and hopefully gets something in return. It does not follow that non-binding EA programs confer an advantage. The JHU link specifically says the advantage is given because of the known yield which is not the case in these SCEA programs (especially in prior years where all SCEA HYP hopefuls may have applied to Yale). Jeff Brenzel has been very clear that Yale does not admit anyone in December who they are not certain would be admitted in April. I still cannot imagine what motivation you think he has to obscure the truth. I would be interested in looking at the book link you posted but the brief review on line is not useful in supporting your position since you can’t lump all “early admissions” together.</p>