<p>Well, there he goes again. Challenging orthodox views on the central notions of truth! Etchemendy, who's a wonderful guy, bleeds cardinal, not crimson, and I knew he wouldn't go. (If only I knew about those gambling sites last week, I could have paid my daughter's next year's tuition!)</p>
<p>But I can't help but think that if Stanford plays defense by deferring large numbers of the cream of its EA pool for too many rounds, there might be a backlash and it might lose the favor of the very kids it wants to court, particularly in the northeast, and sooner or later, its EA will fall as well.</p>
<p>Stanford is in the early stages of an effort to raise its national (academic) recruiting profile, and one can safely assume that this effort, together with the launch of a program for alumni interviews of applicants, will increase the yield rate beyond its West Coast heartland, which is disproportionately low at present.</p>
<p>It will be a sad day when major universities are reduced to further reliance on computer programs, crystal balls, and tea leaves predicting who will accept their offers in making admissions decisions. The absurdity of the US News and World Report criteria for ranking universities, and the negative consequences of these criteria for students and universities, is made very clear here. If Stanford is flooded with EA applications from students whose first choice is Harvard and Princeton in 2007, and Stanford's yield therefore takes a hit, will that mean that Stanford had suddenly become a worse university, deserving a much lower ranking than it enjoyed in 2006? Because if FarmDad is right, Stanford's yield and therefore its ranking could drop precipitously. Should Stanford then be stuck trying to figure out how to maximize yield in this new admissions landscape -- as opposed to just trying to reach out to the incoming class it actually wants -- in order to maintain its ranking? </p>
<p>That said, at my children's high school, which feeds HYPS, Harvard and Stanford seem to handle EA vs. RD very differently. The hs encourages kids to apply to their real first choice, and then exerts pressure for the kids to attend if accepted, which means that the colleges know they can expect a very high yield in our early application crop. Harvard seems to accept everyone they're going to take from the EA applications. Virtually everyone else is deferred. Even viable applicants who are deferred are almost universally rejected at RD. Virtually no one, including candidates who seem to the outside eye not to be viable, is outright rejected at the first round. Legacies who seem to meet the (very high) admissions criteria are almost always admitted. And I only know of one student who applied to Harvard RD who was accepted. (And didn't go.) At Stanford, on the other hand, there seems to be more of a sorting out process with the first round. Applicants who seem very viable are sometimes outright rejected, rather than deferred. And students who apply RD still have a decent chance of being admitted. Also, while overall being a legacy appears to be a boost, viable (In fact, such strong candidates that it was shocking.) alumni children were rejected at EA at Stanford. In other words, the EA pool would appear to go through more of a real acceptance/rejection sorting process. It will be interesting to see if changes in the Stanford admissions policies, if any, will make a significant difference at the individual high school level come 2007.</p>
<p>In response to criticism that it was indirectly encouraging the expansion of discriminatory and legally questionable early admissions programs, USNews dropped yield as a "selectivity" factor several years ago. The biggie now is the "accepance rate" - so the more applications you get, apparently, the more selective you are, whether or not those you admit matriculate.</p>
<p>WUStL and Chicago have benefitted in the rankings due to this change. (Their yield rates has been relatively low,)</p>
<p>Now, perhaps, Yale and Stanford will gain an edge vs. the higher-ranking Harvard and Princeton - with a surge in early applications serving as a ratings bonanza! </p>
<p>I love the crocodile tears about the "burden" of dealing with all those extra applications!</p>
<p>Goodness, college admissions are confusing enough already! I don't want to have to consider all this. Stanford is my first choice, is it worth applying early even though I had bad early scores and am trying to show rising grades?</p>
<p>Shark-bite -- Talk to your GC and get a look at you school's statistics for the grades and scores of students who are accepted/deferred/rejected by Stanford EA and accepted/waitlisted/rejected RD. Stanford does not defer everyone they don't accept from the EA pool; some students from the EA pool are flat out rejected. At my kids' school, there were some very strong students rejected that way. If your GC thinks that your "bad early scores" could get you rejected at EA, it could make sense to wait for better scores and first quarter grades and apply RD. Talk this over with someone who can carefully assess your particular situation (grades/scores/EC's/rank/hook) in light of your school's history with Stanford admissions. This will give you a much better basis for your decision. Good luck!</p>
<p>The interesting article about Marilee Jones (part of the publicity surge for her new book) was first out over the AP wires before any of the announcements of changes in early admission policies. (I remember seeing it posted earlier on other newspaper Web sites, with earlier datelines. I have been interviewed by the same AP reporter on other education issues, if I remember correctly, and I generally like that reporter's work and follow it.) Marilee Jones is quoted making an important point about the new admission practices at MIT that developed under her leadership: </p>
<p>"'You don't see the kind of wild innovation from individuals you used to see,' Jones said. 'You see a lot of group and team projects overseen by professionals, but you don't see the kind of rogue, interesting stuff that we used to see.'" </p>
<p>It will be interesting to see what Jones and her colleagues do about the problem she has noticed. It is always worthy of note, in this thread, that MIT is the ONLY college that can defensibly say, based on the data available to the authors of The Early Admissions Game, that its early action program doesn't provide an admissions boost to applicants. MIT seems to know what it likes, and largely admit the same kind of students at the same rate from either the early or regular action pools of applicants. No comparable data exists for Stanford, pace President Etchemendy. Stanford DOES, of course, have internal data about its applicants and its admittees. If one of the scholars who run the Stanford admission office wanted to do some peer-reviewed, publishable research, that scholar could dig into Stanford's data, making the data set available for independent review in the usual scholarly way, and submit an article to a journal. That's how scientists prove points, by publishing research articles (as did the researchers who showed the early admission advantage with the data set they gathered).</p>
<p>I think it should be born in mind that MIT fills a substantial portion of its seats not only with "original" EA applicants but with deferred EA applicants. This year, as I understand it, there were 377 "original" EA admits and about 295 deferred EA admits for the 1000+ seats in the Class of 2010. </p>
<p>I believe it is safe to assume (although the stat has not been reported) that the yield rate is higher for these early pool people than for "ordinary" RD applicants, and that, as a result, MIT does not differ markedly from other elites, in the end, with respect to its reliance on the early pool people to fill a substantial fraction of its seats.</p>
<p>It is my impression (until someone can demonstrate otherwise using hard numbers) that MIT's unique way of handling early pool applicants is a function, primarily, of the demographic imbalance of the early pool, and the need to defer numerous early applicants who will later be admitted in order to ensure the kind of "diversity" they are seeking for the class as a whole.</p>
<p>That's an interesting thought, Byerly, and of course I am not privy to the data that would resolve the issue. Interestingly, a few years ago on the math problem-solving site where I first learned about CC, there was a statement that MIT, in the universe of colleges sought by math-liking young people, was the most mysterious in its admission decisions. Over the last few years, thanks to the MIT bloggers and the posts of MIT students, alumni, and parents here, I feel I have a fairly strong sense of what MIT is looking for, and I no longer think MIT is particularly random in its admission decisions. It will be interesting to see how the MIT early action pool changes, as I think Stanford's also will, now that neither Harvard nor Princeton has an early program, as those four colleges have a substantial overlap of aspirants and applicants.</p>
<p>My guess is that you will see an even larger number of deferrals and a sizeable increase in the use of waitlists, all with an eye to preventing yield erosion and preserving the ability to achieve "diversity" with a high degree of precision.</p>
<p>I wish they did accept 90% of early applicants...Wait, No I don't. If they admitted that many of their early applicants, they wouldn't be as good/selective a school.</p>