you go EA… you admit over half your class EA… you set the ball in motion for escalation. it’s game theory and U of Chicago is using it to its advantage. you have your opinion about it and I have mine.
Last year, CalTech’s entering class consisted of 235 students. Small class size, in part, explains why its median SATs are consistently higher than those of any of the other top universities.
Just a means to an end, huh, @sbballer …
What did you think of the data/articles on ED’s pernicious consequences? While the escalation has been predictable, do you think it’s commendable?
The logical end to this would be lots of schools with sub-10% accept rates, 70% yield, Chicago once again appearing less selective than its peers (because once Harvard and Princeton choose to play this game, let’s be real, they can drum up a lot more apps than Chicago), and… colleges that totally squeeze out the middle class. Would your opinion about this be so rosy then?
Chicago’s 8% accept/70% yield won’t look that great then compared to Princeton’s 3% accept/85% yield…
You do realize that, as this game theory plays out, Chicago will eventually be the loser, right?
Princeton is already playing the game to drum up apps.
it’s a very interesting game theory exercise in play… obvious HYP games the system with EA and admitting a high amount of its class through it. there is obvious collusion among these schools.
U of Chicago enters with ED… apparently 2 rounds of ED… to gain a yield advantage.
how it plays out among top schools will be very interesting from a game theory perspective… because there is an “ethical” component to “rational” participants.
For whatever it’s worth, here’s a link. http://www.businessinsider.com/the-50-smartest-colleges-in-america-2016-10/
@sbballer - so, are you saying what saves Chicago from being the loser is the “ethics” that other schools will show, that Chicago does not?
HYP may game with EA, but we know ED is the true trump card.
Because if Princeton went ED/EDII/RD AND marketed even harder, what do you think there stats would look like? Princeton may already drum up apps, but come now, we know the ace in the hole is ED/EDII/RD - that’s where you REALLY boost yield and lower accept rate.
If Princeton did that, I’m guessing they’d look a lot better than Chicago’s #s, no? But maybe Princeton’s ethics here will exceed Chicago’s, and save Chicago from the loss?
this is a very interesting variation of prisoner’s dilemma… I think it will partly depend on how U of Chicago starts affecting stats with the ED push… … rankings… admission stats… SATS… yield… the usual suspects… or perhaps Yale jumps the gun goes rogue and goes ED next year… lots of moving parts.
Right now Princeton is making a big marketing push to boost app numbers. They are feeling the heat to “appear” more competitive… even though they will never admit it:)
@theluckystar and @sbballer - clicking through, those “averages” seem to be just averages of the 25th and 75th percentiles, so don’t mean a lot.
Princeton in particular is no stranger to gamesmanship, but historically did it by providing, in effect, merit money by the back door (see here: http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW05-06/08-0215/features.html). This actually benefited non-full payers, so was much less problematic, in my opinion.
@sbballer - as @DeepBlue86 said, Princeton is no stranger to gamesmanship. Some Princeton higher-ups have even dabbled in criminal activity in this space in the past (see: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/26/nyregion/princeton-pries-into-web-site-for-yale-applicants.html)
This being said, based on your use of game theory, what would prevent any other school from going ED/EDII/RD? I mean come on… what do you think the ED push is going to do for rankings, admissions stats, yield, etc.? From an institutional standpoint, there’s no downside to using ED - it’s a pernicious practice that benefits the school.
Note how quickly education and institutional culture/values drop out of these discussions.
FWIW, Princeton is expanding its class size and allowing undergrads to transfer in (something it hasn’t done in decades). I think Yale and Stanford are also increasing class size and UChicago is doing so as well. This suggests that the “game” isn’t simply how low can you get your acceptance rates. It’s also how (much) can you grow without sacrificing the quality of the educational experience you provide? I don’t think anyone is delighted to be turning away lots of talented undergrads. And, frankly, if the institutional goals include global influence and creating a more diverse and equitable college environment, having more slots to work with is a good thing.
the marketing push helped U of Chicago have the second highest SATs in the US after Caltech. something they could not have achieved 10 years ago even if they wanted to in my estimation.
that helps it in the USNWR rankings along with lower admit rate. ED may help boost SATs higher and help in the rankings further. EA and ED are all part of the same slippery slope if you’re viewing it from an “ethics” standpoint.
viewed from a prisoner’s dilemma standpoint… it’s a predictable outcome given the given set of circumstances. USNWR rankings… prevalence of EA… common app etc.
@exacademic - Yale has built two new colleges which will open in the fall, enabling an expansion of 200 students per year; this spring, they admitted the first expanded class.
Princeton has begun planning for an expansion of initially 125 students per year; this will require building a new residential college, for which they’ve recently identified the site. The actual expansion is some way off. It makes sense to permit a small number of transfers, because the new building - when built - will have overcapacity until Princeton has admitted four expanded classes (this is what Yale is facing with the new colleges). In the meantime, they can backfill the existing classes by admitting a few selected students with desirable characteristics.
Harvard is in the middle of a large development project in Allston, across the river, which includes the engineering campus and some residential and commercial buildings, but they don’t appear to be considering expanding the student body (it’s probably not possible anytime soon, given that they’ll be renovating the existing residential houses well into the next decade).
Stanford has the most ambitious plan: they want to add 100 students per year until 2035, at which time they’ll have 8,785 undergraduates. This will require more than 2 million square feet of new academic facilities and over 3,000 housing units (they’re adding graduate students and faculty, too). Fortunately, they have plenty of land to build on.
Funnily enough, these expansions are themselves escalations of an arms race; there are some limited economies of scale, and so long as the schools can educate, house and feed the expanded student body to the same standard as before, they can admit more of the students they want.
HYPS don’t need or want to maximize their median SAT scores. Their admissions pools would certainly enable them to match or beat CalTech and Chicago if that were their primary objective. But it isn’t. Nor should it be. SATs and ACTs do a really poor job of distinguishing among high-scoring individuals. So even if a university’s only goal was to have the smartest group of undergrads it could find, taking the highest scorers on standardized tests wouldn’t give them that group. And if you are a school that already attracts the strongest applicants (by virtue of your reputation, history, faculty, resources), you don’t have to rely on having the highest scoring undergrads this round to attract the highest scoring applicants next round. Conversely, there are some schools (Wash U, Rice, USC, and Alabama come to mind) that are working hard to increase the number of high scorers among their undergrad population so that they can establish themselves as places where smart kids go to college. Is that gaming the system? Or is it seeking out the kinds of students who will enable you to become the kind of university you want to be?
FWIW, I don’t think CalTech or UChicago or MIT fall into either camp. I think these three schools have historically been niche schools for undergrads. Their kids tend to be smart (in distinctive/identifiable ways) and both their curricula and their admissions processes enable them to make the match. The kinds of kids that want to go to these schools (and that have the skills these schools are looking for) will typically (but not always) be kids who also happen to do well on standardized tests.
To the extent that UChicago’s median SATs have increased, it may have less to do with its own marketing than with the increased difficulty of getting into HYPS for high stats kids who aren’t from underrepresented groups and whose strongest suit is brains. It’s also been interesting for me to watch, over the past 35 years, Harvard College get less intellectual while Princeton’s and Yale’s undergrads have gotten more intellectual. In some ways, I think Yale and Princeton are easier for UChicago to compete against than Harvard has been.
PS If true, the argument that UChicago’s marketing has increased the academic caliber of its undergrads contradicts the usual claim that the marketing has been a scam to get large numbers of unqualified kids to apply and be rejected, thereby increasing the school’s perceived selectivity.
I think it just goes to show that people routinely invoke models like arms race or prisoners dilemma in contexts where they have little explanatory value.
@exacademic - I second your third paragraph (see what I did there?). On your “PS”, though, I would say that I think both of those things can be true: (i) UChicago’s marketing has increased its perceived selectivity and brought it larger numbers of high-stats applicants who (ii) are also having a harder time getting into HYPS if they’re unhooked, so are more likely actually to enroll at UChicago and raise UChicago’s median SATs.
just goes to show you that a lot of folks rely on heuristics and rationalizations:) and are often wrong.
Given that we’ve established that those rankings of SAT “averages” are in fact rankings of the averages of the 25th and 75th percentiles, it’s clear that to treat them as true averages of all students is a heuristic that’s definitely wrong.
This ranking is, in fact, very easy to game if UChicago (or any other school that uses ED) wants to do so. All that’s required is to admit enough kids with triple-toll-free 800 scores ED (so you’re assured of getting them) to drag up the 75th percentile, and take care to admit very few low-stats outliers who would pull down the 25th percentile. Without the pressure to maintain a D1 athletic program and win national championships, the job is easier.
So, in opposition to @sbballer game theory for narrow admissions strategies, here’s some interesting data on economic diversity at U.S. colleges:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/opinion/2017-college-access-index-methodology.html
NY Times has been tracking the number of pell grant recipients (i.e. students from modest financial means) at american colleges. As the data shows, since 2008, most top colleges have seen a rise in pell grant recipients at their school. So, for example, Harvard went from 13% in 2008 to 17% in 2012-14.
Interestingly, Chicago’s economic diversity numbers declined a bit - from a high of 13% of pell grant recipients in 2008 to 12% in 2012-14 to 10% in 2017.
The NY Times then ranked schools based on commitment to economic diversity - and Chicago came in at #55 in the most recent ranking.
This demonstrates that certain schools may have a wider band of goals to meet in admissions, and other schools may have a narrower set of goals. Harvard, for example, seems more committed to economic diversity than Chicago. Chicago, on the other hand, seems more committed to have more wealth in their class, and also is obviously committed to having very high SAT scores.
This may show, then, how some schools may NOT decide to be as applicant unfriendly as Chicago, and may NOT decide to have restrictive, excessively game-y admissions strategies like ED/EDII/RD. Not having ED could hurt a school’s SAT averages, maybe bump yield down a little, and possibly sacrifice a point or two in accept rate, but some schools are willing to do that.
On the other hand, it looks like Chicago is most strongly committed to three things in its admissions strategy:
Low Accept Rate
High Yield
High SATs
Economic diversity is much farther down Chicago’s list, and Chicago is happy to be the worst offender in gaming admissions, as long as it promises high yield, high SATs, and low accept rate.
(Also, Chicago’s numbers for URMs have stayed quite flat over the past ten years, so expanding ethnic diversity doesn’t seem to be a high priority.)
So, maybe in some ways, Chicago’s admissions outlook has declined a bit since 2008.
In which UChicago ranks 11th among elite colleges that have a high percentage of low/middle income students. It also suggests that increases in percentage of Pell Grant recipients since 2008 are primarily the result of expanded eligibility rather than increases in economic diversity at various colleges. FWIW, UChicago ranks #114 in ratio of students in top 1% to students in bottom 60% of HH income.
All of this data (and Cue7’s) is, of course, pre-ED. So it can provide a baseline from which to evaluate the effects of ED on the school’s economic diversity.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/university-of-chicago gives more school-specific data
@exacademic - the ranking where Chicago comes in 11th amongst the ivy plus uses old data - it looks at years 2000-2011, I believe. It doesn’t capture the time when Chicago started overhauling its admissions policy.
Obviously, the impact from the ED switch will be telling. I’d be surprised if Chicago has as high a percentage of low/middle income students in 2022 as it did in 2002.