Interesting article in the WSJ today Expect College Wait Lists to Be Obnoxiously Long This Year - WSJ which also predicts a very robust waitlist this year. Excerpts because of the paywall:
"Applications submitted via the Common App, which is used by more than 900 schools, rose by 11% nationwide through March 1. But the number of applicants increased by just 2.4%, meaning nearly the same number of students are casting a wider net…
“The wait lists are going to be obnoxious this year,” said Rick Clark, director of undergraduate admissions at the Georgia Institute of Technology, meaning they will be both long and active for a long time. Last year, some highly selective colleges dipped into their reserves beginning in early April, and continued to do so through July, and he expected that prolonged process may be even more drawn-out now…
Every time students are taken from a wait list and accept the new offer, they give up a spot elsewhere. That school turns to its wait list, and down the dominoes go."
Found this funny for some reason. 
Friend’s kid goes to Horace Mann in NYC and their college advisors said to be prepared for “copious use of waitlists.” I get the idea that they got it from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.
Doesn’t this indicate a lower tendency to draw from waitlist for highly selective schools? For example, if a kid who wouldn’t have applied in a typical year got admitted by MIT, he’s more likely to accept the offer than a traditional MIT admit, right?
but considering that the same kid also got selected to, say yale, then what ?
either way there will be one seat left to be filled at any one of these colleges.
Rick Clark, mentioned in the WSJ article also had a great blogpost about 3 weeks ago on this same subject. Also, it wasn’t behind a paywall for me so it may not be for a lot of people, and I’m not a subscriber.
How Will College Admission Change in 2021?
I think for the most selective colleges, they may reduce the total number of students that they initially admit while they get a better sense of yield. For Yale, they intend to matriculate the same number of students as prior years (1500-1600) even though 341 original Class of 2024 took a gap year. I think the university is expecting something like a 7% increase in total undergrad population, and with the largest bulges in the incoming frosh and soph classes, the school will not be housing the majority of frosh on Old Campus as is the tradition Amid historic housing demand, preliminary housing plans for next academic year announced to undergrads - Yale Daily News. With space and teaching resources at issue, I would think schools in this position don’t want to be surprised by a higher than expected yield and will build their classes up from the waitlist. This will domino down to the less selective schools as they lose admitees to more desirable schools.
On the other hand, schools that are already scrambling for students without deep endowments may be forced to accept higher than normal numbers of students because they cannot afford to be light on students matriculating.
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The advantage that Harvard, Yale and Stanford have over Princeton now is that since Princeton didn’t have EA, they don’t know who would prefer them to the others so they can’t manage yield as well. It might have been better for them to have offered it and deferred most candidates.
Do you think it’s likely Harvard, Yale etc will take more students that they defered at early action than usual? If they are worried about yield
I don’t think they are worried about yield numbers per se (bragging about high yields). Instead, colleges with space issue because of students taking gap/deferred years, are more likely to assume very high yields when offering initial acceptances. If yield is lower, colleges like Yale and Harvard will have no problem getting students in from the waitlist to hit their optimal class size. They would get into trouble if they assumed lower yield than actual and have too many matriculating students. Easy to add students. Too many bodies on the other hand creates housing and other resource issues, academic and physical. IMO, they will compare SCEA and RD applicants without regard to which round they applied. They are going to choose who they feel are the best candidates to fill out the class.