Title. I know the process can often go up to March 31st, but I read somewhere on here (I forgot which thread) that top tier schools tend to have the majority of their decisions by the second week of March. Is there any general consensus as to when the Ivies know for the most part who they’re taking? I mean they’re probably not going to be accepting ~1600 RD students all on the same day on March 30th, so I would imagine they would have been done for some time before results day.
Yes, of course, most of the decisions will be pretty settled well before the announcement date. But there’s no way of knowing when that is, or when X% of admits have been decided. Not even sure how or why it might be useful information for you, honestly, but I suspect it’s potentially psychologically counterproductive to dwell on something so intrinsically unknowable. @reallylost
Decisions can be changed up until the moment the decisions are released. Search my user name and Hopkins. I’ve talked about how my status (along with about 100 other applicants) was changed from accepted to waitlisted the day before letters were mailed out (back when they didn’t do online notification). You might have to go back 10+ years to when I was posting as a high school senior @-)
I agree, it’s mostly meaningless other than to say that if something major happens that makes you look more competitive, send it in no matter how close you are to the deadline.
Technically, no one is officially accepted or rejected until committee at most competitive schools, which can take anywhere from 2 days to 3 weeks. However, prior to the committee you can be unofficially rejected from the first read of your application which could theoretically occur in early January. If you don’t impress your first reader, your second reader will likely give no craps about your application. If you don’t manage to impress both of them, your app will likely never even make it to the committee discussion, being mentioned in passing as a reject.
This year Harvard EA was way earlier than expected, so sometimes they do finish before deadlines but the Ivy league is bound to release decisions (save likelies) on March 31.
I have been told horror stories of committee running into the late night as admins argue over who should be admitted though!
@iwannabe_Brown - How do you know your status was changed?
I went to a wealthy private school (e.g. it was name dropped on Gossip Girl) with a very well connected GC. Looks like I talked about it 2 years ago too: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/17060263#Comment_17060263
If I dig way back into my posts from 11 years ago: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/759532#Comment_759532 I see that with Penn at the time my GC actually had been told in early March that I was “most likely going to be accepted.” It definitely wasn’t as firm a statement as JHU gave him, but like I said, he was pretty sure they had changed my status from accepted to waitlisted at some point in March.
Worked out in the end, I had Brown ranked above both of them on my personal list anyway 
@iwannabe_Brown
When people fill in the school type information on chances and decisions threads, besides average public/above-average public/etc., “name dropped on Gossip Girl” should be an option (along with, for example, “basis of several John Irving novels”).
^ Which also means GC has a batphone to the Ivies.