@exacademic why are you assuming that those kids who committed to EDI didn’t make a “fully informed choice”? Who was strong-arming them to apply EDI?
Princeton has never had a yield higher than 70%. At least not recently.
Yale has had around 70% for many years… (New Heaven??? No, thank you)
Only Harvard and Stanford have had yields close to 80% (This year Harvard has a 84%, an historic record)
Last year Princeton had 68% and UChicago 66%…Not a big difference at all.
@Cariño: Princeton had yields in the >70% range for at least a couple of years in the early 2000s and possibly longer - see here: http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW05-06/08-0215/features.html
As of May, 71.4% of those Yale admitted this year have accepted their places in “New Heaven”, as you call it - see here: http://news.yale.edu/2017/05/16/class-2021-one-record-books
I would expect HYPS’ yields to continue to creep up, primarily due to their ever-more-generous financial aid offers making them the cheapest option for many of those they admit.
I would guess UChicago’s yield this year was in the 70s, if not higher, because it appears two-thirds or more of the class was admitted early decision or off the waitlist. We’ll see if/when they disclose the actual figures.
@DeepBlue86
Princeton yield last year was 68.6%
Total Admits: 1911
Total Enrolled: 1312
1312x100/1911= 68.6%
https://admission.princeton.edu/how-apply/admission-statistics
As you said, @Cariño:
And as I replied:
As described in the linked article, Princeton's yield crested in the >70% range in the early 2000s, as a result of Princeton using ED and briefly having the most generous financial aid among a number of its peers. I believe it slipped back into the >60% range when those peer schools matched Princeton's aid levels and all converged on SCEA, eliminating Princeton's advantages. It has risen steadily over the last several years with those of all of Princeton's peers as they continue to increase aid levels and target larger numbers of first-gens for whom they're arguably the best and cheapest alternative (see here: http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2016/05/u-yield-reaches-68-5-percent-for-class-of-2020).I think someone “in the know” posted that UChicago yield should be 75% this year. Thus, they beat Yale and Princeton and cream Penn and Columbia.
Comparing yields between ED schools and non-ED schools is not an apples-to-apples comparison.
Yes, Princeton had yields around 70% back when it was the only one of HYPS to offer ED, it filled almost half of its class ED every year, and got criticized very heavily for that, ultimately by its own former president.
All of you who are woofing about how everyone plays the game ought to remember that Harvard and Princeton made a clear effort to end all early admissions among ultra-selective schools in the late 00s. They did that precisely because a mountain of data indicated that it was not fair to students, especially to students from middle class and working class families who were not necessarily sophisticated about college admissions and were very price-sensitive. That was especially true of ED, and it was even true to some extent of EA, largely because students and their families often failed to understand the difference between EA and ED. The effort failed because Yale and Stanford wouldn’t go along with it, and because Princeton, especially, was getting hurt. (Also UVa, which was the one other university to sign on with the crusade.) So Princeton joined, and Harvard re-joined, the SCEA crowd.
HYS originally adopted SCEA, after a brief experiment with unrestricted EA, because they didn’t want to push all of their regular admissions into the early round, when their staff had less time to read applications. The idea was to keep it small, and to emphasize the primacy of the regular decision round in the spring. That hasn’t worked out completely, but it hasn’t failed completely, either.
The colleges that offered unrestricted EA, and not ED, did so explicitly because it offered the best deal to applicants, and was not designed to favor the institution. That used to be Chicago, MIT, and Caltech – hardly a bad crowd to hang with. The version of restricted EA offered by a number of Catholic colleges, led by Georgetown and BC, in which the only restriction is that applicants cannot apply ED elsewhere (and, effectively they can’t apply SCEA, because the SCEA schools won’t allow it), was also adopted and maintained on moral grounds, not as a gaming matter.
Hello, but despite their pronouncements of “moral grounds” (perhaps they were talking about the physical grounds of the campus? LOL), BC and Georgetown’s “Early Action” plan is just SCEA. This is actually a tad deceptive as an admission plan called “Early Action” in no way restricts an ED application elsewhere - at least not the way that the term has been defined by both the association of college counselors and pretty much every other college and university. Darn those Jesuits (I say that as a Catholic 
)
I could go faster than anyone else by bringing a bike to a foot race, but then did I really “cream” them?
Also, @JHS, the idea that Harvard and Princeton tried to break out of the cartel because it wasn’t “fair” to middle class students is just laughable. Had they really wanted to be “fair” they would have remained with RD exclusively and to heck with all those other mean schools who are hosing the middle class. The fact that they felt they had to rejoin means they were being hurt, as you pointed out. “Fair” certainly makes for a great press release, however (especially if you are the big guy with the deep pockets).
Edit to add: “Being hurt” in a way they weren’t willing to. In actuality, Harvard can offer free tuition to every undergraduate who enrolls. All. Four. Years.
Yes, universities are bottomless pits of money that can afford to toss out a few hundred million dollars in revenue every year. Where is this idea coming from? Is it not clear that every school (even Harvard) is aggressively pursuing the children of the rich because they desperately need someone to pay tuition? Even an endowment of several billion can get swallowed up easily with some spending on vanity projects. Just ask Zimmer and Boyer.
Suppose Chicago’s ED system has had or will have the effect of further lowering acceptance rates and jacking up yield (something that was happening anyhow as JHS, cue and others have pointed out). I believe that is what is being called “gaming”. However, isn’t the real question whether the introduction of EDs 1 and 2 further helps the Admissions Office identify and recruit applicants who are both high quality and especially suited to Chicago? Isn’t that what an enlightened Admissions Office ought to be doing? I am not sure I’ve heard anyone on this board deny that Chicago’s ED system has this effect. If it does, then a dismissive term like “gaming” hardly seems the correct way of describing it.
I haven’t read the pieces which assert that ED is especially hard on kids from middle and lower-income families. If anyone here can direct me to those pieces I would be grateful. My suspicion is that those effects do not have the magnitude that is being suggested. A piece in the NYTimes a month or so ago rated 170 colleges on the basis of their receptiveness to poorer kids:
The methodology of the ranking was not made very clear. However, some algorithm was applied to two factors: (a)percentage of Pell grants and (b) “net price, mid.income” (which I take to mean what is actually paid per annum by a mid-income student after all scholarship and grants are taken into account). Chicago finished 55th in that ranking, well behind Harvard (10), Princeton (13), Columbia (18), Brown (26) MIT (24), Duke (32), Dartmouth (43) and Penn (45) but well ahead of JHU (71), Cornell (79), Northwestern (80), WUSTL (114) and NYU (141). The percentage of Chicago kids with Pell grants (10 per cent) was lower by a few percentage points from the schools above Chicago, and the net price was a bit higher at Chicago ($9,000 as against $8,250 on average for the eight peer schools higher in this ranking).
What interested me in these figures was the almost negligible net price differential as between Chicago and the peer schools above it. Of such small differences are mighty charts constructed. I see no reason in any event to think that ED has had or will have any effect whatever on the level of financial assistance awarded to middle and lower-middle class kids. Look at the situation of the peer schools above Chicago that are not operating under ED. An average difference from Chicago of $750 per annum! A difference which may or may not be correlated in some small degree to the lack of ED at those schools. And look at the peer schools below Chicago, most of which I believe also do not have ED. (I have no idea why Yale and Stanford don’t appear at all on this chart.) I conclude that if middle and lower-middle kids are being disadvantaged, it is more a matter of psychology than financial aid. Chicago ought certainly to make efforts to reach those kids. Marketing and perhaps a greater familiarity with ED should help in that process.
A final thought: If Chicago’s ED system does to some extent privilege upper-middle or higher class kids, that is by no means an argument for it in my mind. But it somewhat surprises me to hear JHS, as well as many others, deplore that putative effect when in other contexts they want the socioeconomic profile of the typical Chicago student to go slightly more upscale and to become more like that of the ivies. So I interpret the many discussions commending the changes in the character of the student body brought about by the introduction of ivy-league like amenities and student culture. Why is that a good thing in some contexts and a bad thing in others?
Harvard and Princeton tried to break out of it, and got rid of ED, but their peers didn’t join. They’d have been happy to live without it, but it’s fatal for any of them long-term to be seen as losing out in the competition for the best students.
Unfortunately, Harvard can’t offer free tuition for all undergrads - they don’t have the unrestricted funds to do so, and the university would have to shrink. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences (which includes Harvard College) runs at a deficit, and is subsidized by units such as Harvard Business School. John Paulson can give hundreds of millions to build an engineering complex, but Harvard can’t easily find the money to renovate residential houses that haven’t been overhauled since they were built 80 years ago.
This illustrates the common misconception that the endowment is one big pot of money somewhere, rather than thousands of separate accounts spanning Harvard’s schools and designated to different purposes based on donor intent. Harvard can’t, for example, reallocate funds designated for programming in Harvard Medical School to financial aid in Harvard College. More here: http://www.harvard.edu/about-harvard/harvard-glance/endowment
@DeepBlue86 - don’t believe internal cost accounting. I know.
If 80% of Harvard’s $38 billion or so is restricted, that leaves about $8 billion unrestricted. At a return of about 4.5% (based on the returns of other universities from people I know who are involved in this calculation), that’s around $360 million. There are 6700 undergraduates in Harvard College at a tuition of about $44,000 per student amounting to a grand total of $295 million. Thus, their unrestricted easily covers tuition and fees. Now, of course we have to account for faculty salaries and so forth. But Harvard also has scholarship money tied up in it’s endowment as well which will lessen the burden on restricted funds’ coverage of tuition. Bottom line: Harvard could make a significant dent, should it choose to. But that would be a fiscally poor decision as the school happens to have a 4.5% accept rate with a critical mass of families willing to pay full. BTW, that’s probably also why they won’t upgrade their dorms - why should they? What is the financial benefit to doing so?
One of the issues that is not being discussed in this now EA/ED thread is the changing landscape of college admissions, specifically the norm now seems to be 10-20 college applications per student. This rise in applications, by default, will lower yields at most colleges, some of those outside the top 10 are really getting hammered on their yields. Colleges are naturally reacting to this by offering up ED which BTW is much more of a detriment to middle income families that low income families.
If only that were so, @JBStillFlying. The annual payout from Harvard’s endowment (currently around $1.7bn) already covers more than a third of the university’s operating budget, and, notwithstanding the gifts Harvard received during the period, this payout, coupled with anemic investment performance, caused the endowment to lose $2bn in value in the last fiscal year. See the below, from Harvard’s disclosures:
Over the past five and ten years, Harvard disclosed that the cumulative annualized returns of its endowment were 5.9% and 5.7% respectively. It’s therefore paying out nearly as much as it’s earning (recently more, as noted above). Over the last twenty years returns have been higher (10.4% annualized), but there’s certainly no guarantee that they’ll ever get back to that level.
To divert additional hundreds of millions a year to financial aid in Harvard College, Harvard would have to liquidate endowment funds that could permissibly be liquidated for this purpose. It’s not clear that there are sufficient funds available for Harvard to do this legally (i.e., that there are enough funds that aren’t explicitly earmarked by donor intent for other purposes). And even if Harvard could do this, there’s no free lunch: unless Harvard was willing to spend down its endowment, it would have to find hundreds of millions a year to cut elsewhere. As the following article indicates, those cuts would be felt across the entire university, and would undoubtedly be controversial: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/9/23/2016-hmc-returns-explained/
The experience of the last financial crisis is instructive. The endowment lost $11bn in value in 2008. An annual 5% investment return on that would be $550mn. When the crisis hit, the development of the Allston campus had to be halted, leaving it as a parking lot until the endowment recovered and the Paulson donation was secured. And, as the article says:
I’m not suggesting we should feel enormous sympathy for Harvard students losing their hot breakfasts, but the point stands. You can think of Harvard as a person with a great deal of inherited wealth that’s tied up in a trust fund, and who is maintaining an expensive lifestyle and several residences while not earning much current income. It’s not as hard as you might think for money to get tight in that kind of situation.
they can liquidate a few Billion from the Trust fund.
@JBStillFlying , if you don’t understand the difference between Georgetown’s version of EA and HYPS’s, you really aren’t paying attention. Under Georgetown’s version, you can apply anywhere else you want early, as long as you aren’t committed to enroll if accepted. You could apply to Stanford EA if Stanford would let you; you just can’t simultaneously apply to Penn ED. If you cared to, you could apply early to Georgetown and 10-15 other great schools (including Chicago, although its EA program seems moribund, with an admission rate somewhere below 2%). With HYPS, if you apply SCEA you are precluded from making any kind of early application to any other private university or college. I am not up on the latest twists of the SCEA rules, but in the past the four schools differed on how broad their exception was for applications to public universities; some had a blanket exception (other than ED, of course), and others permitted only in-state applications, or rolling admissions applications).
As for the end of the Harvard/Princeton experiment: Harvard was not being impacted that seriously – I don’t think its yield ever dropped much below 80% – but Princeton and UVa were both clearly adversely affected. It was a classic prisoner’s dilemma situation: If everyone does the same thing, they are all better off, but if less than everyone does it the people who do will be at a disadvantage. When no one else followed suit – except of course the University of California system, which has never had any kind of early admission program – it was not sustainable for Princeton and Virginia to act alone. Harvard was another matter. It conceivably could have stood alone, but that’s tough to do. And there was a leadership change involved, too, from Derek Bok, who cared so much about this issue he had written a book about it before he returned to his stint as a caretaker interim president after Larry Summers’ resignation, to Drew Gilpin Faust, who may have decided this wasn’t the fight she needed to pick in her first years in office.
As for the Harvard endowment, etc.: Why in the world would they blow the whole thing on undergraduates? Many of them have families who can easily pay or finance full tuition, and many of them are planning to cash in on the prestige of their degrees immediately upon graduation, by taking highly compensated, socially reprehensible jobs. Unallocated endowment income is much better spent on graduate students pursuing knowledge in fields that would be completely unsustainable with university support.
@JBStillFlying and others - the view that Harvard should make its college free is myopic and silly. Elite universities, at heart, have many - sometimes competing - interests and goals. They want to (I believe, for most, sincerely) do societal good and expand knowledge, but, at the same time, they want to prepare leaders and link to power.
Above all, elite Us want to remain at the vanguard - they want to win the brass ring of “best”. If Harvard made its undergrad free, it would severely hamstring so many of its other departments, and its core educational mission in other areas would fail. This would be the height of folly because - as @JHS noted - they have no lack of interest from paying customers.
So, with all these competing concerns, schools try to find the right mix. They accept first gens, but they also accept Kennedys and Obamas. The offer great financial aid to some, but they also cultivate development admits and seek millions in donations from wealthy parents of their students. They look to hire great romance language scholars, but they also try to keep the pipelines to power in finance, politics, and tech alive and well.
In this environment, some schools focus more on their institutional health, and others do look outward more progressively. Currently, Harvard, Princeton etc. seem to push looking outward more than Chicago. With ED1/ED2, Chicago seems quite obsessed with its own standing and optics.
Finally, for those arguing that maybe ED1/ED2 isn’t a bad thing - the key point isn’t just HAVING these programs, it’s how heavily these programs are used.
Per the info on this board, it looks like 70% of Chicago’s incoming class will come from the ED/ED2 rounds. That’s WAY too much, given the drawbacks to these programs. Maybe a little use of ED isn’t bad for the reasons other posters presented, but Chicago went way off the deep end, for its own purely shallow self-interest (who cares if yield is 70% ot 66%?).
If they did that, @Chrchill, to continue the analogy, they soon wouldn’t be able to generate the income to maintain some of the residences and would have to let them pass out of the family. It would eventually become clear that this once-aristocratic family was headed downhill. They would no longer have the power or influence that they once had.
But seriously, @JHS is right. Harvard’s mission extends far beyond its undergraduates. There’s a finite pool of resources (especially unrestricted endowment funds) and a lot of mouths clamoring to be fed in the name of keeping Harvard competitive and relevant, whether it’s demand for funding more PhDs, increased faculty salaries, modernized labs or residences, expanding undergraduate enrollment, new initiatives of various kinds, etc. Harvard isn’t hoarding money; they spend where they think they prudently can, and they inevitably leave a lot of people unsatisfied.
If one or more of its close competitors decided to make undergraduate tuition free, Harvard would consider how that might affect its overall ability to carry on its mission and would evaluate its response, knowing that if it decided to send more dollars in one particular direction, it would have to reduce funding elsewhere or limit the scale of its mission over the long term by spending down its endowment.