<p>aint it the truth</p>
<p>If Cornell takes this step, it will deserve far more credit for institutional bravery than Harvard, Princeton or UVa, and expose Yale, Columbia and Penn as craven slaves to yield rate protection.</p>
<p>Lets hope USNews will find some way to give Cornell credit for doing the right thing (assuming they do!)</p>
<p>because USNews is obviously the college authority...</p>
<p>"A Posse Ad Esse"</p>
<p>Like it or not, in the minds of many potential applicants to schools, USNews <strong>IS</strong> the "college authority.."</p>
<p>See: "The Influence of the U.S. News and World Report Collegiate
Rankings on the Matriculation Decision of High-Ability
Students: 1995-2004"</p>
<p>Which is why the article in the Sun the other day is truer than most Cornellians wish to admit.</p>
<p>What makes this guy "influential"? I've never heard of him. So he was chairman of some committee, big whoopee.</p>
<p>I'm really not sure whether cutting ED will help Cornell. It seems to me like a lot of great students might well prefer a feasible ED slot at Cornell vs. a complete gamble in RD at schools like Cornell, much less the few even more ultra-selective schools. And once those kids are in the RD pool, when you're competing with 12 other schools, fin aid packages, etc I think it's tougher to get that same kid.</p>
<p>When admissions levels at some schools drop to single digits, admissions to those places start resembling real lottery picks; for an increasing level of great student they just aren't good enough bets to hang their hats on. Ironically, hyper-selectivity probably runs counter to the top colleges getting some of the best kids. IN particular, increasing selectivity in RD of the second-level selectivity schools is having this effect; if one waits to RD, admission to Cornell is no safe bet. The perception of impossible or arbitrary admissions practices in RD of many of the top schools leads some great kids to make safer ED choices. EG Cornell. We're considering this same issue with my own kid right now. Why risk EDing at a place that nobody has a good chance of getting into, or waiting for RD where the chance is even less than that? In that kind of scenario Cornell probably starts looking good to some outstanding applicants.</p>
<p>Now if all of the colleges as or more selective than Cornell abolish ED, that might be different.</p>
<p>I haven't thought much about it, though; I could be wrong.</p>
<p>I agree with you, monydad. It's in the Cornell's and some of the top applicants' best interest to keep ED.</p>
<p>No matter how many applicants a college gets, it has only so many seats to fill, and no matter how many colleges a kid applies to, he can only matriculate at one of them.</p>
<p>The best strategy for Cornell is to maximize its overlap with HYPS, and hope that it will get its share of the 90% who don't gain admission to those schools.</p>
<p>The strategy might be different for a school like Penn that attracts enough applicants willing to make the Faustean bargain, and finds enough worth admitting to fill (the strategic maximum of) half the freshman class.</p>
<p>You could be right, I haven't seen any ED numbers, much less analyzed them.</p>
<p>As an alum, I've been exposed to a fair number of recent students who have made this so-called "Faustian bargain" at Cornell, and were very happy to be there as a result.</p>
<p>I'm sure this colors my perspective, and whether the numbers actually "work" I don't know.</p>
<p>I said I wasn't sure, not that ending ED was wrong.It's entirely possible that my hypothetical applies better to some schools "behind" HYPS than to others.</p>
<p>This is what I think is going to happen if Cornell drops ED. Most of the students will be HYPS rejects and therefore truly feel they are "second class". With the current arrangement, many ED students can argue that they would have an equal chance of being admitted at HYPS should they have decided to apply there. They just didn't want to take the chance because they saw it as a lottery, therefore they ended up applying Cornell ED which they think was the right decision anyway.</p>
<p>Generally, I would tend to agree with Byerly's thinking about finding a way to strategically overlap with HYPS for the 90% group.</p>
<p>Beyond that, I wonder though, would there be any value to Cornell and for its student prospects to offer the conventional EA option...vis a vis MIT for instance...as opposed to adopting the RD round only?</p>
<p>Ultimately, would not a good percentage of the typically strong Cornell ED candidates find there way to Ithaca...ED notwithstanding...and make their intentions known far earlier than May 1st?</p>
<p>Just wondering?</p>
<p>Consider, however: at least in the case of Harvard and Princeton, Cornell would be sharing a greatly expanded RD pool - there would be no more HP early pool "rejects" applying to Cornell strictly on the rebound.</p>
<p>Its a variation on the rationale for accepting the common app ... ie, more apps are always better, even if the marginal applicant may less "committed."</p>
<p>Along the same lines, I thought Brown made a mistake when it stopped tying itself to Harvard by sharing a large open EA pool and switched to binding ED. When they made the move, the early pool dropped from over 5,000 to under 2,000. </p>
<p>Sure, the early pool yield went up, and you could argue that the smaller ED applicant group was "commited to Brown" (either truely so, or for strategic reasons), but I think they were better off (and certainly did better in the USNews rankings, when they were "settling" for presumably well-qualified Harvard "leftovers" who might otherwise never have applied to Brown.</p>
<p>As for open EA: without Harvard playing the game, there are fewer attractive cross-admits who might be enticed to Ithaca. Few would give up MIT for Cornell, and the overlap with Georgetown, Notre Dame, Chicago, etc., would not be a huge plus for Cornell, IMHO.</p>
<p>Cornell has a big class to fill, this can possibly have some impact.
Also its various colleges are not necessarily all in the same competitive situation.</p>
<p>I wonder whether the "right" decision for, say Arts & Sciences, might be different than the "right" decision for, say, Human Ecology. Or Hotel. And whether the administration would permit different policies for different colleges.</p>
<p>Diversity has a price, sometimes.</p>
<p>Another thing that has occured to me is that the colleges in the Ivy league college are not the only schools whose admissions policies need to be considered. The actions of schools like Northwestern, Chicago, Georgetown, NYU, Johns Hopkins, Tufts, Wesleyan, Vassar are possibly more relevant to Cornell than whatever Harvard does or doesn't do.SUNY Binghamton for the contract colleges. Carnegie Mellon and RPI for engineering.</p>
<p>IIRC, Cornell currently gets more applicants than any of the Ivy League schools. Perhaps its policies would to some extent create a "ripple' of their own, somewhat unrelated to Harvard. There is not complete overlap in their applicant pool.</p>
<p>I'd say the endowed schools are the only ones impacted either way. The tuition differential for the land grant colleges reduces losses based on financial aid, and the hotel school will continue to attract a special subset of the applicant population. </p>
<p>As a general rule, these schools enjoy a higher yield rate than Arts & Sciences and Engineering, which go head to head with other elites for top students and have to deal with a more sizeable overlap.</p>
<p>Byerly - did the draft of the study of USNWR on the effect of rankings on application patterns ever appear published anywhere? How did you find that study?</p>
<p>Here's a reference to the seminal study by Eherenberg of Cornell:</p>
<p>See also: <a href="http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/99/12.2.99/rankings-matter.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/99/12.2.99/rankings-matter.html</a></p>
<p>You maye be able to find the whole study in a library; I've only found summaries on the net.</p>