Is Harvard SCEA worth it?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Harvard University
1

Hey guys!

I’m a rising senior and don’t know whether applying early to Harvard is worth it. I say this because, although the acceptance rate for SCEA is about 10% higher than RD, wouldn’t early applicants at Harvard be EXTREMELY well prepared? Plus, considering students who apply early due to legacy, athletes, huge donor status, etc., would it make admission for me (no hooks) even harder than RD?

I’d love to hear what you guys think (especially anyone at Harvard/who knows a lot about admissions, please reply!)

Thanks a lot for the help.

Cheers!

2

This will be the case at every top college that offers EA/ED.

Same answer as above.

If Harvard is your top choice and your grades/SAT scores will not see a dramatic improvement in your Senior Fall semester, I see no reason not to apply early, unless applying early excludes you from any scholarship opportunities elsewhere.

3

Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford are all on record as saying “We don’t accept anyone in the SCEA round that we wouldn’t accept in the RD round.” That’s Admissions-speak for “We accept the best-of-the-best in the early round.”

If you are the best-of-the-best from your high school – meaning if you are academically ranked in the top 1% to 3% of all graduates from your HS class AND have top test scores – you SHOULD apply early somewhere. That’s true even without hooks, as the very tippy-top students stand a better chance of being scooped up in the SCEA round as they are showing demonstrated interest in one college by applying SCEA.

However, if you are ranked in the top 3% to 10% of your high school class – no matter what race, ethnicity or test scores – your application has more of chance of being deferred, as Admissions will want to compare your file to a larger application pool. So, think carefully about applying SCEA, as the applicant pool is self-selective.

4

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

"Harvard does not offer an advantage to students who apply early. Higher Early Action acceptance rates reflect the remarkable strength of Early Action pools. For any individual student, the final decision will be the same whether the student applies Early Action or Regular Decision.

Considering if you should apply Early Action or Regular Decision

Regular Decision offers important practical advantages in the later application deadline (January 1). You will have more time to complete the application components—more time for you to edit and proofread your portions of the application and more time for your teachers and counselors to become familiar with you before they write on your behalf. You may also want to consider whether your application would be strengthened by senior year extracurricular achievements or improved academic performance.

If your record and accomplishments have been consistently strong over time, Early Action may be an attractive choice. You don’t have to commit to coming to Harvard, but you will learn earlier if it is an option for you."

If not Harvard, you should still apply somewhere EA that is one of your top schools (ideally a reach or a high match). Two of the three outcomes will be useful:

Admitted: greatly reduce application and test report fees and time spent on applications of schools you ranked below the EA school, significantly lower or eliminate anxiety
Denied: maybe your overall application is not as strong as you think and you need to recalibrate your expectations; if you have near perfect academic and test stats, maybe you need to rework your essays and consider alternative LoR’s.

5

Skip the SCEA option and pick out one or more EA options while preparing scholarship essays for those schools that give scholarships and require extra essays. That would be time better spent. Later, once you have expanded your options, apply RD to Harvard.

6

nonsense.

Harvard offers a clear statistical advantage for early admission. Harvard along with Y and P admit over half their class EA to boost yield… admit rates are 3-4x higher. Take advantage of it and apply early… your odds are better.

Stanford only admits 35% of its class EA so less of an advantage here.

MIT offers zero advantage by applying early… ea admit rate is the same as ra. so don’t waste your bullets here.

7

With no hooks, applying early to Harvard makes little sense. Consider applying early to places that don’t restrict like University of Chicago and others.

8

If you just looked at the headline numbers, you’d conclude that you’d be several times more likely to get in to Harvard if you applied SCEA rather than RD. As you note, though, you have to back out all the hooked candidates and make some assumptions about the proportions of “serious” but unhooked candidates in each round to get a sense for how real the SCEA advantage would be for someone in your position.

There was a thread called “The Plague of Early Decision” that discussed this very issue at some length. In that thread, @al2simon did some analysis and came up with around a 5% advantage at Yale (i.e., the odds for “serious” but unhooked candidates applying SCEA were ~12% as opposed to ~7% in the RD round). I would guess Harvard wouldn’t be dramatically different. In other words, there’s an advantage to applying SCEA, but it’s not a game-changer.

Maybe you’re strong enough that you should use your early bullet at Harvard, since it will help at least a little, statistically. What you need to do, though, is take a clear-eyed view of your chances and consider whether you ought to apply ED somewhere (e.g., UChicago, Penn, Columbia, etc.) where you’d get a very substantial boost.

9

@LeBirthdayBoss Only thing to add to the advice above is to take a look at the Naviance numbers at your school. If your school has enough applicants to Harvard to be statistically significant, you can see how much of a boost early application gives for applicants from your HS. The numbers vary enormously from HS to HS. At my son’s HS, the success rate for Harvard early was above 30% while the success rate RD was under 10%. The stats between the two groups were not greatly dissimilar. Early had about 20 points higher on the 2400 SAT scale, and less than half of one percent higher GPA.

10

Related to that^, though, when considering the Naviance results at your school, try to assess how many of the ones who got in early were hooked. For example, if you attend a top prep school, a not-insignificant number of those admitted early to Harvard may be connected Harvard legacies, development cases, celebrity children, academically or otherwise elite URMs or recruited athletes (particularly for certain sports often associated with affluence).

11

Replace “Harvard” in the above sentence with Yale, Princeton, Stanford, etc., and the sentence will still be valid. Regardless, the casual user viewing Naviance will be unable to ascertain info beyond cut-and-dry data.

12

Agree that the same observation^ applies to any of the tippy-top unis.

If your school graduates more than 50-100 students a year, and sends many kids every year to the tippy-tops, I’d also agree that you probably won’t be able to see much behind the clusters of symbols on the Naviance charts. At smaller high schools, though, sometimes when you look at a Naviance chart you can have a very good idea which individual got into that single-letter school in the last few years with that GPA and those test scores.

13

Harvard admitted 45 % of the 2021 class EA (938 of 2056). The EA admission rate was 14.8%. The implication that half of the class came from EA implies greatly increased odds. All recruited athletes and most legacies and other hooked applicants were in that 938. The nonhooked applicants were far more qualified than the average applicant in the RD round who might be submitting an application just to see or maybe even just to say they applied to Harvard.

EA doesn’t increase yield. ED increases yield. And Harvard’s only concern about yield is that it will be too high, and it was this year.

14

I think this is a first for me…I’m actually going to come to @sbballer’s defense…

In fact, I think Harvard probably did admit about half of the enrolling class of 2021 EA, because I’m going to guess that the yield on SCEA admits is around 90% (as opposed to >95% on ED admits at most other schools). I’m willing to bet that if you use your single early bullet on Harvard and you get in, nine times out of ten you’re going to enroll (particularly because the financial aid is about as good as any out there). Many kids won’t even apply anywhere else after that.

Assuming a 90% yield, 844 of those 938 kids Harvard admitted SCEA this year are going to enroll. In the SCEA and RD rounds, Harvard admitted a total of 2,056 students and disclosed an 84% yield, implying that 1,727 accepted their offers (http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/5/10/class-2021-yield/). 844 is 48.9% of 1,727, so very close to half. Of course, the 84% yield this year was as large as it’s been in recent memory. If it had been 80%, as it was for the class of 2020, the proportion of the class admitted SCEA would have been about 51%, or more than half.

If the yield on SCEA admits is higher than the weighted average yield of SCEA and RD admits (and, at Harvard and any of the tippy-tops, it stands to reason that it is), then we have to concede that EA increases yield. ED, of course, increases yield much more, both because ED admits have close to a 100% yield and because ED is used at schools that have RD yields lower than Harvard’s, thereby increasing the weighted average yield much more.

15

Is 90% vs 85% really significant? And you are guessing at the 90%. An overall rate of 85% yield shows that yield is not a concern for Harvard with is my point.

Penn uses ED to boost yield. Some schools may use EA to boost yield. Correlation vs causation. Harvard has high yield because it’s Harvard, not a preference for SCEA.

16

I had done a quick calculation of an implied ED boost at Brown vs. EA at Harvard using this year’s admission figures. I took Harvard at their word, see the quote from their website at my post #3 above. This was my calculation:

Harvard: EA% 14.5% (938/6473); adjusted for 200 athletic recruits plus 20 other super hooks, 11.5% (718/6253). RD% 3.4% (1118/30333). The gap between EA% adjusted for special cases and RD% is 8.1%, so let’s take Harvard at their word and attribute the difference to a superior pool.

Brown: EA% 21.9% (695/3170); adjusted for AR and super hooks, 16.1% (475/2950). RD% 6.9% (2027/29554); The gap between the adjusted EA rate and the RD rate is 9.2%. If we now attribute the 8.1% value from Harvard as representing the superior pool factor, the ED% can be seen as 8.0% vs 6.9% for RD on a more apples to apples comparison. There is a difference/advantage, but it is not of the order of magnitude when we simply look at 22% vs 7%, or even 16% vs 7%.

I actually think the 220 number is conservative for H, plus I think it is safe to assume a disproportionate number of EA applicants have some other non-automatic hooks, (e.g. legacy, consistent (not super) donor, URM, faculty children). On top of that is the undoubtedly superior EA pool vs. RD. Even if you don’t take Harvard at their word, the real number is nowhere near 14.5% or even 11.5% vs. 3.4%.

If you are a tippy top student (above median test scores plus top 3% of class), and Harvard is one of your say top 3-5 choices, it doesn’t hurt to go for it. If you get deferred, you are no worse off. If you get accepted, you just have to apply to 4 or less more schools. If you get rejected, time to revisit your essays and LoR’s.

I’d also say if Stanford is one of your top 3-5’s, I might choose to apply SCEA there because they don’t defer so many students, giving you a better read on how competitive your application is.

The only time applying to Harvard SCEA that hurts you (assuming your first semester grades are not going to be a factor and your application is completely buttoned up) is if in fact an ED school is your clear favorite and it would mean foregoing that advantage.

1 Like
17

The thing is, it’s (I’m guessing, but I think it’s well-founded) 90% vs. ~80% in most years - the overall yield was unusually high this year.

I would agree that Harvard is always going to have among the highest yields out there, because it’s Harvard. Bear in mind, though, within the last decade they tried to give up early admissions and eventually went back to it, because they were losing too many candidates to their close competitors. So they’re not immune to yield concerns.

Personally, I think Harvard (and its peers) use SCEA primarily to shape the class with a high degree of precision, not because of yield concerns. They know that a kid who applies SCEA to them is predisposed to attend, and therefore, if they really want a kid with those particular attributes (star quarterback, virtuoso contrabassoonist, star URM, etc.), they’re going to show the love by admitting them early if they can. The challenges for Harvard and its peers are to avoid (i) admitting so many applicants SCEA that they fill up the class and can’t give enough offers to attractive candidates who apply RD; and (ii) making applicants feel that if they don’t apply SCEA, they have no shot at admission, since that would impel too many to apply SCEA and would probably reduce the number of apps overall.

18

^^^ Showing love is indeed a factor, the reason for the non-athletic likely letters in the RD rounds. But I would add that I still think it is a rare case that a kid who gets in SCEA would have been rejected RD. Pure speculation of course. The indirect support for this speculation though is that a fair number of deferred’s get accepted in the RD round, meaning at least in the SCEA round, the SCEA admits were ranked higher than the deferred. I guess the possible exceptions may be the virtuoso contrabassoonist who was the best one in the SCEA pool, but may only be the 5th best in the RD pool.

19

Oh, I agree, @BKSquared - I think often the school’s goal when accepting someone SCEA is to show sufficient love that the kid is discouraged from applying anywhere else. To your point, the school knows they want the kid irrespective who shows up in the RD round, which implies that the school believes the kid would have been admitted in whichever round they applied.

That said, I think there are some kids who won’t ultimately be admitted unless they apply SCEA. Here I’m speaking of some legacies who might be on the bubble. I’ve seen a number of them apply SCEA, get deferred and then admitted RD. I’m going to guess that if they didn’t apply SCEA, the school would assume it wasn’t that important to them, and might admit someone else (possibly another legacy) instead. It’s impossible to know how many of these the school knows they’ll eventually admit, but doesn’t want to waste SCEA admits on.

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@DeepBlue86, the borderline legacy is a good example of the rare case, probably comes up more than the contrabassoonist.