<p>Harvard wins all the cross admit battles - against every school, students admitted to H and another school usuallly choose H. So take a kid who was admitted to H SCEA - he typically would not apply anywhere else so H got a +1 and no school got turned down.</p>
<p>Now eliminate SCEA at H. Now the kid applies to 10 of the elite schools, gets into H and accepts. H gets a +1 and NINE of H's competitors get a -1. Even though H does not win all of these battles, on net they are going to gain in relative yield against their competitors for the #1 ranking.</p>
<p>What if they decide to apply to Yale or Stanford SCEA, and by that time are drawn to those schools instead of Harvard? I personally think that the matriculation rate is going to go down if no other university follows suit.</p>
<p>I think they are doing it because they want to balance the playing field. I respect their decision and considering that this idea seems like it is going to work and that Harvard is the most influential college around I think that many schools will drop SCEA.</p>
<p>Ya know, even though we all seem to get a cynical vision of schools plotting cruel tactics to increase yield and rank I don't believe it. I think schools are just trying to make the best class they can.</p>
<p>I respect Harvard more now. They said that SCEA will not offer an advantage to students over RD and people didn't believe them. Now for sure it doesn't.</p>
<p>Still Harvard has a great deal of reputation catching it. Even if they slip in rankings, Harvard is still Harvard-the school that most people have grown up believing is the best school in the world. The can afford to take risks the way other colleges can't.</p>
<p>I always thought Stanford and Yale were slightly more elite than Princeton simply because they were confident in SCEA to leave it open. They wre trusting that top students will pick their school over others. Princeton and the lower Ivies (I hate to call them that) are concerned that if top students get in at one of the other 3 universities they will be turned down. That is why they have ED.</p>
<p>I always liked MIT the most out of the schools because they had the most open EA policy of all. Theirs was not SCEA or SCED. They were simply EA. They were so confident that they were willing to completely get rid of all binding policies.</p>
<p>Now Harvard is the least binding of them all and at the top my little respect tree.</p>
<p>well I'd be careful about giving MIT THAT much credit. I think that, for the most part, they could afford just the EA since they offer a very different experience than all other top schools... save CalTech, of course</p>
<p>Yale admits about 1300 per class. About 600 come from SCEA. Only a portion of those are cross admits. Some of those will cross back to Harvard. Whatever stays at Yale isn't going to significantly impact Harvard's class.</p>
<p>No way. This is a risk for Harvard. It's a calculated risk, and one I support because it's good for higher education, but there's no way it's going to drive their numbers up vis-a-vis their competitors. Every school gets a higher yield on EA admits than on regular. You have so many extra months to recruit them, and so many opportunities to convince them to just withdraw all their other apps. Giving up that edge is a real sacrifice.</p>
<p>I also have no idea how they're going to squeeze the decision-making process into four months, just in practical terms. I'm sure they have a plan, but there's no question that they're making their own burden worse.</p>
<p>
[quote]
But Stanford’s dean of admissions and financial aid, Richard H. Shaw, said that many colleges could be hesitant to follow in Harvard’s footsteps. </p>
<p>“I applaud them for this—that’s a pretty gutsy move,” said Shaw, who previously served as Yale’s admissions chief. *“But it’s possible that only Harvard could do it. A lot of other institutions would really have to be considerate about a change like this, since they don’t quite have the attraction that Harvard does.” *
[/quote]
It's quite possible that only Harvard will try this.</p>