" We already know that the 44% also includes a lot of recruited athletes."
Small clarification. The very high ED numbers at Vandy, Duke, NW and Wake would not include very many (maybe any) athletes. Since those are Power 5/athletic scholarship/BCS D1 athletic schools.
The athlete/ED thing is only a thing at the Ivies and selective D3s.
Now we are talking ED only? What happens if you are not accepted? Better luck next year?
MM – SCEA as practiced by HYPSM is a bit of a different animal than the ED practiced by Penn, Duke, NW.
To the extent that it is SC, it functions quite closely to binding ED even though it isn’t binding. You have to limit yourself to one early school and if you get in you are 80+% likely to enroll.
But that type of SCEA is different in that it doesn’t involve much (if any) strategic admissions advantage. If the SCEA admit rate for HYPSM is higher than the overall rate, it is due mostly to the strength of the SCEA pool and not much due to different standards being applied by the school.
As you can see from the school’s own statements, eased standards is definitely part of the ED model at Penn, Duke, NW etc.
I have absolutely no problem with ED. If a school is kid’s 1st choice and the family is willing to take the FA risk then they can apply.
Also it works for the schools because they know they yield from this part of the process,
If this means some special snowflake doesn’t get in during the RD cycle, then its a consequence of their choice not to apply ED.
“maybe HYPSM could have a modified ED draft system for a fixed percentage of their classes. I’m not an antitrust lawyer, but it seems to be OK for the NFL. It would be interesting to design the rules for that.”
The NFL draft is only legal because it is included in a collective bargaining agreement. Unions would be illegal as cartels except for the fact that by law they are largely exempted from antitrust. There’s your fun legal fact for the day!
Ivy League is definitely subject to antitrust. They used to collaborate and coordinate their financial aid offers with the idea (this was in the pre ED and SCEA days obviously) that kids could consider multiple Ivy acceptance offers without regard to finances. You got the same deal everywhere. The Ivies got sued by the govt in the 1990s and settled. But MIT (who was also part of the consortium) took it to trial. And lost.
Minor correction: I believe all of the Ivies had ED at the time of the antitrust suit. If there wasn’t any possibility of getting a different financial aid offer from one of the close competitors, then there was a lot less of a barrier to applicants committing to an ED application. The move of Harvard and Yale to EA was in part a response to the new world where competing financial aid offers was the norm. (Princeton didn’t go to EA until 7 years ago. It had ED through the high school class of 2007, then no early admissions for 3 years, then SCEA.)
I just had another brilliant never-going-to-happen idea, to address the yield management issues.
Instead of ED, all the schools have EA (with some known acceptance advantage). When applying, students also submit a ranking of all the schools they’re applying to, to some neutral 3rd party (could be collegeboard, or some entity like that). The ranking is non-binding, and heck, it can include ties if the student wants.
Colleges submit their list of accepted / deferred / rejected students to this 3rd party. In return, they get a presumably fairly accurate prediction of how many of their accepted students will attend. The colleges can then send out another wave of EA acceptances if they want, or they can just use that info during the RD phase.
I guess this would just be a way of allowing students to delay committing, while still helping colleges predict yield accurately.
What’s the point of non-binding, from the school’s perspective? Great for Johnny. But this isn’t just about making things just smooth for him. I do get that that’s ultimately what a parent would like. But it’s not the full equation.
And what stops him from choosing Y, not X, in the end? I said it needs to be affordable, but what if, even after NPCs, Y offerred a few thou more?
The idea in ED is you’re ready to commit. Not to make acceptances roll in and give the kid til May to define what commit means.
“What’s the point of non-binding, from the school’s perspective?”
Well, schools are tax-exempt non-profits that are supposed to be in the business of doing what’s best for their students.
“The idea in ED is you’re ready to commit.”
This argument made sense when 20% of seats went to ED applicants. At 40%, not so much. At 60+%, it is complete BS.
The schools have deployed some increasingly powerful carrots and sticks that are resulting in more and more kids being “ready to commit” sooner than they were in the days before the schools deployed the carrots and sticks. LF – you have to understand that the rules adopted by the schools are shaping the market and influencing behavior. Maybe not for your kids, but for lots of other kids. There’s reasons why a bunch of schools backed off of ED about 10 years ago.
The yield management issue is a NON-ISSUE. All these ED schools already manage vast numbers of non-binding apps quite successfully. They aren’t doing ED to get their seats filled. Every year they fill all their seats. They fill up the one half from ED. And they also fill up the other half from RD just fine. And many other schools fill all their seats without using ED at all.
And the kids who wind up picking Duke on May 1 end up just as committed to and loving of Duke as the kids who picked Duke on November 1 instead. They all love being Dookies. They all pick Duke irrevocably over all their other alternatives. They just decided at a different time. The May 1 kids maybe love Duke even more. Since some of them had the chance to attend Vandy or Georgetown or Cornell but picked Duke nonetheless.
Duke is doing big time ED to manipulate their yield and admit numbers (10% – close to Harvard!) in order to keep up with the Joneses (HYPSM) and USNWR. And they are doing ED to hit their budget for full payors.
What’s the point of binding applications, from the school’s perspective? If it’s just yield management, then having the kids guess where they want to go, even without committing, will likely be almost as accurate. That’s all I’m saying.
If people don’t think ED is about yield management, then my suggestion isn’t that useful.
“What’s the point of binding applications, from the school’s perspective? If it’s just yield management, then having the kids guess where they want to go, even without committing, will likely be almost as accurate.”
Ding ding ding ding.
That’s exactly why Duke doesn’t have any empty seats in the half of the class that does not come via ED. Somehow they figure it out. Every year. Year after year. 50 butts in 50 seats (more or less).
And also why USC, ND and GT don’t have any empty seats either. How in the world do they do that with no ED? 100 butts in 100 seats (more or less). Every year. Maybe they are good at mind reading?
No. Yield management is pretty simple and can be done many different ways successfully.
And everybody gets an award and a pony, maybe your kid gets two ponies. This is all so self serving.
Bad analogy. It is only one pony per customer. You can’t ride two ponies. Everyone has to pick one pony to ride.
The RD kids at Duke pick Duke as their one and only pony. The ED kids at Duke also pick Duke as their only pony. All the kids at GT pick GT as their one and only pony. Same for all the kids at ND and at USC.
End of the day, it doesn’t really matter if you pick your pony on November 1 or May 1.
Everyone has to pick only one pony. No one gets two ponies.
If you apply to a bunch of schools RD, you only get to ride one pony. If you apply to Duke RD, you have to pick Duke as your one pony. If you apply to Duke ED, you have to pick Duke as your one pony.
Perhaps it is self-serving to say that the kids who pick Duke on November 1 are somehow more deserving than the ones that pick it on May 1?
End of day, why should it matter when you decide to pick your school?
Only thing I can think of is that it matters if you want your admit rate to be lower. And it matters if you want to manage how many full payors you have. Can’t think of any other reason to care.
I don’t think it’s quite right to say that picking your one pony on November 1 is the same as picking it on May 1, @northwesty. If you fall in stat range for, say, Princeton, and you think you present a package they could find attractive, but you’re risk-averse so you apply ED to Duke, that’s different from taking the process all the way through and going to Duke after Princeton denies you. In one case, you decided to forgo a possible opportunity; in the other, you gave up nothing. In particular, if you aren’t a full payer, by applying ED, you’re giving up at least some of your ability to negotiate for fin aid. It’s possible to believe that ED might be a little excessive in some places and still think that ED applicants might merit some preference.
Regarding yield management, I continue to maintain that while these schools can undoubtedly figure out how to get approximately the right numbers of bums in seats, that job has to - has to - have become harder when you have multiples of the apps you used to get, many of which are in tippy-top range, and the numbers keep going up. Adding some certainty with ED - to a point - doesn’t seem to be an unreasonable response (to me, anyway).
I really REALLY think the filling seats explanation is 110% BS.
Duke has 1,745 seats to fill each year. It fills 817 via ED. That’s the easy part.
But after ED, Duke has to turn 28,000 apps (RD plus some ED defers) into 828 Duke enrolled students. That’s nuts! Duke needs to have their pencils extra sharp in order to bulls-eye that target. But they do it every year.
Duke’s RD math doesn’t seem any easier than the math for turning 30,000 total apps (without ED) into 1,745 enrolled students. Which of course is how GT, ND and USC do it every year.
ED is not about putting 100 butts in 100 seats. It is about influencing who the butts are (i.e. fuller payors). And also about the acceptance rate you have to publish (18% vs. 10%) in order to get to the 100 butts.
“And also why USC, ND and GT don’t have any empty seats either. How in the world do they do that with no ED? 100 butts in 100 seats (more or less). Every year. Maybe they are good at mind reading?”
EVERY selective college, regardless of how students apply - SCEA, EA, ED, RD - accept MORE students overall than they anticipate enrolling, based on years of their own past enrollment history and enrollment history of other similar colleges. That IS the definition of "yield management’ .Yes they are “guessing”, and sometimes they guess wrong, which is why they sometimes go to the waitlist to fill the class, and sometimes have to cram 3 students into a room designed for 2 when more students say “yes”
There’s something other than yield management going on here.
The “tragedy” that people seem to be concerned with here – the potential Princeton student who settles for Duke and will never know whether Princeton would have taken him – is not much of a tragedy at all, at least not to society, and certainly not to Duke. Duke isn’t interested in conceding that it is inferior to Princeton, or being relegated to the role of only taking students HYPS rejected.
People at Duke may legitimately believe that Duke’s educational product is superior to Princeton’s, and Duke is engaged in a long-term effort to convince the world of that. In order to do that, it’s important to get students of the same quality that Princeton gets, and you don’t do that by enrolling only kids that Princeton has rejected. You need to get some kids that Princeton has not rejected. It’s extremely hard (and extremely expensive) right now to do that with kids that Princeton has actually accepted, although Duke doesn’t concede those kids, either, and works hard to land them against tall odds. It’s a little easier to reel some in with ED, and so they do. The fact that it helps Duke keep its admission rate almost as low as Princeton’s is definitely a bonus, but the real win is getting high-quality students that might not be available if you let them play the field for another six months.
I’ve now checked out that WaPo article that @northwesty flagged in #231, read a bit about some of the schools he’s been discussing and I think I’m starting to understand this a little better.
First when you look at the chart in the article showing the schools that admit the highest percentages of their classes ED, the first thing that jumps out at you is that the vast majority are LACs. This says to me that LACs in particular feel the need to lock down a lot of their classes with ED because they’re subject to so much competition from research universities and each other. Also, as @northwesty says, it increases their percentage of full payers and gooses their perceived selectivity (and therefore their competitiveness) by reducing their admit rate.
The next thing you note in that chart is that the research universities there tend to be the ones that are trying to move up in the rankings, e.g., Penn, Emory, Tufts, Vandy and Northwestern. This, I think, is one of @northwesty’s points, in that he argues that they’re accepting all these kids ED in order to look more selective. But, as @JHS says, if these schools are trying to move up a notch, it’s also logical that they’d try to pick off kids who might ordinarily aim higher. The best way to do this is to lock some of them up with ED, as these schools seem to be doing. I also still believe that increasing the proportion of the class you accept ED is a natural response to the growing numbers of kids cascading down from higher up the food chain, which is related to @JHS’ point (and to what @menloparkmom is saying, in that you reduce the potential yield management problem you face if the absolute number of seats left for you to fill is smaller because you accepted much of your class ED).
Finally, with regard to the virtuous-because-they-don’t-have-ED USC, Georgetown and Notre Dame, my hunch is they don’t have it because they’re troubled much less than most other schools by the need for full payers and perceived selectivity. Why? Because, it seems to me, unlike the universities in the previous paragraph, they occupy particular market niches that give them the full payers they need without difficulty, they’re not subject to the same competition as their peers and they’re not trying to move up the hierarchy because they’re happy where they are. USC is where you go in CA if you want a top school that isn’t a UC or LAC and Stanford’s out of reach - and the student body is 20% legacies, most of whom, I would imagine, are full payers. Georgetown and Notre Dame, both top-25 schools, are arguably the leading Catholic universities in the country, top in that category in their respective geographical regions; Georgetown is the oldest Catholic university in America, with some highly regarded specialized schools; Notre Dame, which has a $10b endowment and where nearly a quarter of its students are legacies, probably doesn’t have a yield management or full-pay issue. Working the ED angle wouldn’t give these schools anything they want, I believe.