<p>ALL colleges send out such letters. I don't see why Harvard shouldn't be allowed to do so.</p>
<p>"Harvard already has too many qualified applicants - why solicit more (especially those who have zero chance)?"</p>
<p>You seem to think that a school should only try to recruit a sufficient class, not the best possible class. But why should they be satisfied with excellence when they might be able to do even better? Other departments at Harvard don't say, "We've got enough grant money to keep the lab going, let's not apply for any more," or "Our English faculty is good right now, so we won't make tenure offers to stars at other schools." No matter how strong your brand name may be, you have to work to stay ahead of your rivals or they will overtake you.</p>
<p>Also, they aren't soliciting those who have zero chance. To put this in perspective, 70,000 letters represents around 3% of the SAT-takers in a given year. What's so unreasonable about reaching out to the top 3%? Those recruiting letters cost pennies to send; if this were just about driving the admit rate down, they'd send out a lot more than that.</p>
<p>"she will wait hopefully for that rejection letter."</p>
<p>So will most of the kids who eventually get in. If you knew a long-shot admit, I wonder if you would continue to believe kids are getting a bad bargain by giving it a shot. And while we're on the subject of bargains, we should weigh the emotional cost of taking the safe road and wondering whether you could have made it if you'd tried.</p>
<p>
[quote]
It can only be to improve their admit numbers.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>The Harvard admission office has more imagination than that. The Harvard recruiting efforts, described in the magazine article I already linked to (and in other mass media reports), are to get DIFFERENT people into the Harvard entering class besides the usual suspects. Which different people? Until some subset of the recruited students (and a certain number of student who weren't recruited at all) submit their applications and all those applications are piled into the same office, none of the students know, and not even any of the Harvard admission officers know. It's getting all the applications together in one big scrum that lets the admission officers enter into debate (and it is literally that, according to press reports) about which few hundred students will be admitted out of the much larger number who submit applications. One student applying from Mississippi (an example Northstarmom brought up recently) looks like a long shot if 200 other students from Mississippi apply, but looks like a sure thing if no other student from there applies and Harvard continues to value having a student from every state in the United States in its entering class. The other classic example is the student who plays the oboe. (My best friend's daughter plays the oboe--she attends an LAC in the Midwest and would never have dreamed of applying to Harvard.) If all the oboe players at Harvard are about to graduate, and only two or three oboe players apply, they will be shoo-ins that year, but wouldn't be in another year when 100 oboe players apply. And so on. </p>
<p>So I reject the idea that anyone knows beforehand who has NO chance. (That is, among the students who receive the recruiting letters, I take the recruitment to be in earnest.) It's mathematically undeniable that most people who apply will not receive an offer of admission, but about 2,000 each year will. This reminds me about the saying of the retailer Wanamaker that he knew that half his advertising budget was wasted--but he couldn't tell which half. Harvard recruits vigorously, students apply in great numbers, but it's not till April that anyone knows for sure who got in.</p>
<p>well, march 31st is when we're supposed to find out</p>
<br>
<blockquote> <p>By giving tips to legacies and big donors and accepting sufficient kids from well known school systems or private schools Harvard can make sure they accept as many full payers as they like.<<</p> </blockquote>
<br>
<p>I have to agree with mathmom here...Harvard is a university that can truly pull off being need-blind. Still, being need blind, I'm guessing that a full 50% of the families are full pay anyway. </p>
<p>I don't know how this middle class financial initiative will skew the numbers. What isn't clear is how the new financial initiative will handle savings or home equity--I'm sure that many middle class full-pay Harvard families are using both savings and/or equity in their homes to pay the bills.</p>
<p>Actually in 2007 more than 50% weren't full pay:
[quote]
Two-thirds of Harvard students receive financial aid, with over 50 percent of the student body receiving need-based institutional grant aid.
[/quote]
from Yield</a> for the Class of 2011 nears 80 percent — The Harvard University Gazette</p>
<p>Home equity is not included in the new financial initiative at Harvard</p>
<p>holy crap that sucks for us! (the article, not the home equity thing lol)</p>
<p>^^Doesn't it just make you all cheery inside? :S</p>
<p>well.. thank goodness it wasn't... the only school that we all applied to.</p>
<p>ARghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh</p>
<p>My daughter applied to many of the ivy leagues, wasn't accepted to Harvard, but got into Cornell and Yale. You have to have plan B.</p>
<p>josh: For most people, Plan B is not......a different Ivy.</p>
<p>agree with mommusic. Where's the difference from plan A to plan B?</p>
<p>I heard (unofficially) from someone at Harvard that they plan to accept about 200 less kids than last year, because they expect yield to increase significantly (thanks to the new financial aid policy). So admit rate may be even lower, around 7% flat</p>
<p>which is even worse news for us...</p>
<p>fast27, that was mentioned in another thread regarding this topic by myself.</p>
<p>xjayz, is that true and official? What are your sources?</p>
<p>These stats on Harvards record year are enough to make me want to turn emo.</p>
<p>Who's with me?</p>
<p>^^^^^
Me!
:P</p>