1NJParent, about “The four SCEA schools certainly increase their respective yields by reducing the chances of their admits to be accepted by their competitors. Their competitors are the other SCEA schools and EA schools such as MIT/Caltech in the regular round. ED schools are not their competitors for those applicants who chose to apply SCEA, rather than ED. Most SCEA applicants choose their SCEA school because it’s their first choice.”
I’ve been thinking about this comment and it seems off.
If the statement were true, you’d expect clear yield rate differentiation between the SCEA schools and those that allow EA with no restrictions right? And you don’t really get that. Harvard is higher than MIT but not appreciably so. In fact, I’d argue the SCEA for those schools increases the yield for the other highly ranked schools. The rational you suggest does not make a lot of sense to me although I could be missing something in terms of my logic.
Seems like the result is the opposite of what you suggest. I’d agree with you if the SCEA schools were a different set of schools. But let’s face it, Harvard just does not have to worry too much about other schools stealing their admits. It’s unlikely that they use SCEA as yield protection.
But, most successful applicants to Harvard could easily gobble up EA slots, taking them from applicants to other highly ranked schools and adding only noise to the application process for the other schools. So I think SCEA helps the yield of the other schools. But I don’t think the rationale for Harvard is altruistic. Not being SCEA but EA could result in an overload of work for the Harvard AdCons. Many more students, many without a shot, might still be willing to check off Harvard along with other EA schools causing a large rise in applications but not an improvement in their pool. Harvard would also have to contend with more legacy wanna-bees (and particularly the parents of the wanna-bees) who know that their record falls too short for legacy status to be likely but who have a good chance at other good private schools. If Harvard allowed unrestricted early action, the number of such people applying would shoot up and they’d have to deal with the parents. (And there is a difference between knowing your kid should’t apply due to his/her academic record and having to contend with an actual rejection of your kid from your alma mater). But with SCEA most (but not all) would choose to apply early to a place they had a better shot at.
MIT, on the other hand, does not have to worry about that problem. They don’t use the Common App and they don’t do legacy. So they have a higher proportion of genuinely competitive students who go out of their way to apply to MIT. Even with EA, MIT doesn’t need to cull from a much larger pool of students who have no genuine interest but decided to give it a shot. All their applicants put in a lot of work to apply, so there are simply fewer frivolous applicants to deal with.
lastly, EA rather than ED for MIT is probably not about MIT not thinking it can compete with other schools but it would be the antithesis of some core values of MIT. (MIT does not even require a deposit with the commitment to accept the offer to attend-so students can opt out without losing money.)
Obviously this is just my speculation but it makes the most sense to me about the choice for SCEA and EA for these schools.