<p>I think that most schools do either disclose it directly to WL applicants or made the information available. If the information of the current year is not available, the historical information can usually be found at the companies that aggregate this information or directly from the Common Data Set. </p>
<p>Of course, as Harvard shows, it does not matter if a school FINALLY decides to make its CDS public; they can still decide to NOT disclose parts of the survey. There is a growing trend in not disclosing the WL numbers and the early admissions statistics. I am not sure why they do this --except when the numbers announced in the press releases are not in line with the more official reporting.</p>
<p>Well, to be sure both numbers require a fair bit of sophistication to really understand. The early admission numbers are misleading in that they combine a fair number of athletic recruits – people with an admission rate of 90-100% – with somewhat-stronger-than-run-of-the-mill candidates to produce an admission rate that looks much better than RD, and probably is somewhat better, but not that much. And the waitlist numbers require knowing how many students stay on, and what different components the waitlist has – the nominal waitlist and the real waitlist being significantly different.</p>
<p>They would have to disclose a ton of information, not just CDS numbers, to make the disclosures really meaningful. Even the colleges that disclose a lot of that information (e.g., comparative test scores for ED vs. RD) don’t say how many athletic recruits are in their ED pool. I feel like I am pretty good at understanding these numbers, and what I “understand” is really an educated guess with a wide margin of error.</p>
<p>JHS, I do not believe that the “understanding” of Early Admissions is an issue of great concern at our colleges. Except for the contributions by Avery, there is really not much in terms of scholarly research. You might have seen one his recent papers:</p>
<p>One factor might be that there is a lot less predictability and historical patterns in early admissions than one might expect. In some many words, the class of 2018 might be quite different from the class of 2017 at the same school. Conclusions drawn from one year might be belied by the analyses of prior years.</p>
<p>Anyone else heard of this? I kow a kid who was waitlisted at a school that told him if he stayed on the waiting list until some date late in the summer and had not been offered admission, then he could go somewhere else and provided he got good grades there, the school where he was waitlisted would guarantee admission as a transfer student for his sophomore year. He said thanks, but no thanks–he had acceptances at schools he like better anyway.</p>