Why is this? Will it continue for the next several years?
Because the early pool is enriched with legacies, recruited athletes, and kids whose high school career is so good they don’t need senior fall on record before applying.
Yeah, that stat is heavily colored by recruits, legacies, and high-priority admits and thus does not really represent higher odds for the rank-and-file applicant.
I agree with the above posters. It’s an illusion!
I don’t know if the others have stats to back up their allegations, but while there is some impact the numbers I’m seeing suggest that the impact should be minimal. All of these numbers are coming straight from The Daily Princetonian, or from calculations using their numbers.
Princeton took last year 767, or 19.9% of their SCEA applicants. The same article notes that 15% of those accepted were legacy. The remaining 85% of those accepted, 652 people (approx) produces a 16.9% acceptance rate. Still a full ten percentage points higher than the university’s overall acceptance rate, and 12 points higher than the regular decision acceptance rate. Given that about 10-15% of ENROLLED students at Princeton are legacy, it wouldn’t appear that legacy students will have any more impact on you during the EA period than the RD period.
I can’t find statistics on athletes anywhere so I don’t know how accurate this conjecture would be. Even if it’s another 15%, the number of non-legacy non-athletes (assuming there’s no overlap between legacy and athletes) would be 537, or 13.4%. Still nearly twice the overall acceptance rate. For there to be no statistical benefit to the SCEA program, recruited athletes would need to make up about 45%, or 345 of the 767 admitted students. That number brings it down to 7.9%, still a hair above normal, but I can’t imagine the number is that high.
All in all while your odds won’t go up to the full 20%, it will improve substantially. Even within those athletes and legacy students, a decent number of them probably would be able to gain acceptance on their own merits - it’s not as though Princeton is letting in hundreds of 1500/3.0 students just because of their parents.
Also consider that because it’s single-choice, the academic talent is being spread out far more than during regular decision. All the people applying (and getting into) to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc. are not applying to Princeton during Early Action, so even if the acceptance rate didn’t change, it’s possible that you would be in a higher percentile of applicants than during the regular decision. It’s easy to get cynical with such an unpredictable process, but it’s not as bad as it may look on the surface.
Recruited athletes are closer to 200 than 100 so your numbers are off. Also, other high priority kids are admitted SCEA (development, celebrities, scions of important leaders, etc.). If you also factor in that roughly 20% of the early admitted class will be URM, and another roughly 20% will be Asian, and perhaps another 10% will be international, you realize that there are actually very few spots available for the typical unhooked white applicant. (I do realize that there are overlaps in the above groups that I’m not accounting for.) So yes, it’s easy to become cynical. The near 20% acceptance rate is very misleading. All you can do is apply and hope for the best!
@Falcon1 : The problem with treating it like that is if you believe that these slots are reserved for a given group of people, you have to take that group out of the pool. So basically, if we’re following this quota scenario, we have x number of spots for “typical unhooked white applicants.” If that is indeed the case, then the “typical unhooked white applicant” doesn’t need to be concerned with those other applicants as far as their prospective chances of admission go, since in this scenario they would not be competing with the asians, URMs, and international students. So, you’d be left with the acceptance rate for this group as (number of white unhooked students accepted) / (number of white unhooked students applied).
I realize now that I failed to account for that in my first calculations (subtracting the athletes/legacy from the denominator) but as we shrink the number of spots considered “available” to us, the denominator will play a far bigger role. If 20% of the slots go to Asians, but more than 20% of applicants are Asian, that would put the “white unhooked” group at an advantage, not a disadvantage. If 20% of the slots go to Asians but only 10% of the applicants were asian, the “white unhooked” group would be at a disadvantage. Same for URM and international.
Also if the university truly does hold such a strict quota system (they say they don’t, but of course who would own up to it) in which applicants are not competing with students of other races, it would be a pretty disgusting policy. Another thing we don’t know is the qualifications of the people accepted and rejected. Of course as with any school of this caliber, they’ll have to turn away thousands of strong applicants, but if one group were to have a higher average talent but was still getting turned away because of hitting a quota limit, that would also add an advantage to the applicants in the less-competitive pools.
You’re right about the denominator which I considered but decided not to write about because we don’t know much about each of the applicant pools. Harvard published for the first time that about 20% of their applicants were Asian (overall - they said nothing about the SCEA pool). I think this was in response to the ongoing discrimination lawsuit. I imagine Princeton’s applicant pool is about the same. For many years, I’ve heard that Asians were over 40% of the applicant pool so I was surprised at this revelation. Perhaps, the with the pools growing so much over the past decade, Asian applications have not kept pace, idk.
In any event, the way I sliced the pie may or may not be the way AO’s view the world. I was just throwing it out as food for thought. It also just so happens, however, the numbers remain fairly consistent year over over year. My point is that the largest group of applications is from white unhooked applicants whether we know the exact numbers or not. When you do the math, you see that the number of actual spots available after all the constituencies I mentioned above are accounted for is really quite small for them.
Edit: To your point about turning away top applicants because a quota has been met is not how it works from what I understand happens at a competing school. Every applicant is considered on his or her merits, regardless of race or other status. After the decisions are made, the class is then further “shaped” to reflect a generally desired class makeup. Usually, the class doesn’t require much shaping I am told.
sorry but there really isn’t any space at princeton for the “white unhooked group.” speaking from experience, everyone here has a hook beyond just well rounded ECs and good grades.
My white kid got in SCEA and had no other hook besides well rounded ECs, good grades, and some (not huge) awards
Is he receiving financial aid? I believe you had posted earlier that money was not a concern.
As said above, the athletes are more than 100.
Also, need to add in at least URM, and “development” applicants.
My guess is that when it boils down, the raw SCEA rate at Princeton for unhooked (non athlete, non development, non URM) is a bit higher than RD. But not by a huge amount.
But then, to add in, you have to look at the strength of the unhooked SCEA pool v. the RD pool. Just guessing, but the RD pool has to have a significant amount of “dreamers” who just throw an app in, because “you never know.” Some percentage of the RD pool (at every school) has to be just completely non-competitive.
That drives the admit rate down.
You’re going to have some dreamers in the SCEA pool, but it’s bound to be a smaller % of the pool.
@8bagels The corollary to “RD pool has to have a significant amount of ‘dreamers’” is that the SCEA pool excludes many top-tier applicants who applied to other top private universities. Everyone whose first choice is in Harvard, Stanford, MIT, uChicago, Yale, etc. can’t apply.
Also, for what it’s worth, this is an old post I submitted in the SCEA applicant thread but it’s relevant here. It’s a more fleshed-out version of my earlier conjectures that I posted above. The TL;DR of it is that if you’re not legacy or a recruited athlete, the chances are around 12% for SCEA, more than double the RD decision (plus you get a shot there too!).
"First, the numbers I’ll be using. We know that this year, Princeton received 4,164 applications for the SCEA program. We know that last year, Princeton admitted 767 applicants to the class of 2019 during the SCEA period. I will be using this as the baseline, since Princeton is likely shooting for a target number of students, not a target acceptance rate. Also note that this is significantly higher than the previous few years, where the number was closer to 700. Also it could be decided to increase the number of admissions due to the 10% increase in applicants, but I will use the 767 number, a compromise between a return to the norms and a corresponding increase this year.
Next, the intangible numbers: what we don’t know, but can infer. The Ivy League caps recruited athletes at 230 per class, but that’s a maximum, not a target. In another CC thread someone mentioned the number 225, which I used in my calculations before I knew about the 230 hard cap. It could be less than both of those numbers. Next, The Daily Princetonian reported that 15% of accepted students from last year’s EA round were legacy. 767*.15 gives us 115 legacy applicants.
I don’t know a whole lot about athletic admissions, but to be conservative about the probability we’re concerned in (I’d rather spit out an underestimate for unhooked applicants than an overestimate) I simply assumed 100% admission - that being, everyone applying as a recruited athlete got in, and all recruited athlete spots were filled during SCEA. That allows us to subtract 225 from both the open slots and the applicant pool. Legacy and non-athletes make up 3939 students competing for 542 open spots in the class of 2020. Combined, these groups have a 13.7% chance of admission.
Next, we have legacy students. 115 legacy students (approximately) will fill the class, giving us 427 slots for unhooked applicants. The uncertainty here, is what percentage of legacy students are admitted? Though it surely is far from 100%, such a scenario would give an 11.1% chance to the unhooked applicants: 3824 students to fill 427 openings. Princeton reports that 30% of legacy students are admitted. That lets us extrapolate that approximately 383 applicants are coming in with legacy status, dropping the unhooked pool to 3555 members. To fill the 427 remaining slots, that gives a probability of 12.0%.
Not sure if that’s of interest to anyone else, but it was to me. No matter what anyone says about EA being “no different” than RD, the number of unhooked applicants admitted during EA is absolutely twice as high as the OVERALL number applying RD, which probably also includes some more legacies and such. Also I don’t believe for a second that the applicant pool is stronger in SCEA than RD. Sure some people might take SCEA more seriously, but in RD you have to deal with all the people who applied to Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, etc… The point is, we’re already at an advantage vs. the people who waited, the admissions rate isn’t as scary as it once was (though it isn’t as nice as the 20% overall) and these estimates could change if they took less athletes, or a lower percentage of legacy students, or any number of other factors."
^^ You would have to continue to whittle the numbers down to get an accurate assessment of what the true EA rate is. There are developmental cases, celebrities or children of celebrities or high profile people, children of faculty or staff that are pretty “hooked” and need to be subtracted from the numerator and the denominator. Also, you would be very surprised at just how many kids who are not direct legacies still have a connection to the school (siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents). In the most recent freshman survey at Harvard, 28% of the respondents said that an immediate or extended family member had attended or is attending Harvard. I imagine Princeton would be fairly similar.
Finally, you may be right about the EA and RD pools both having super strong applicants. The problem is when you subtract all the hooked candidates above in the EA round, there aren’t many seats left over (a few hundred) and most of them will be taken up by the really stellar kids in the early pool. So are your chances really 12% as you say? I would argue after accounting for everything mentioned above and then realizing the few seats left over will first go to the IMO winners, published authors, world class musicians etc., the actual acceptance rate for a normal unhooked candidate is pretty small. Of course, there will be normal unhooked kids that get in as one of posters noted above, but it isn’t easy.
Consistent with your analysis CautiousOptimist, the work of Avery and others concludes, IIRC, that there’s an advantage to applying early even after accounting for legacies, recruited athletes, etc.
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/about/faculty-staff-directory/christopher-avery
Probably not as much at Princeton as at a school that has binding ED, but still as pointed about above applying early shows a substantial level of interest as the student is using that card at Princeton rather than one of the other single choice/restricted EA schools (Harvard, Yale, Stanford). To the extent admissions is concerned about yield, my bet is that those three schools are the ones an admit is most likely to go if it’s not Princeton.
^^ That study is 13 years old and used data much older than that. I am guessing that just 10 years ago Harvard probably received less than 20,000 apps vs the 37,000 today. The game has changed very significantly in the past decade and a half. Kids are much more informed and savvy about what elite schools look for due to the growth of the college consultant industry and sites like CC.
That being said, there is still probably an advantage to applying ED to top schools but for SCEA schools that advantage is almost gone. A disturbing thing that I have discovered is that some kids are applying to SCEA and EA schools in violation of the rules. This makes it harder for everyone in the early rounds.
Falcon1 well I don’t know, but it does make sense to me logically anyway that there would be some remaining advantage to SCEA to the extent the schools care about yield, because at least they know the student (by the rules anyway) did not also apply SCEA to another school i.e. one of their top competitors.
There are of course exceptions allowed in the SCEA rules e.g. I believe Stanford allows students to apply early, even to other private schools, if it’s non-binding and for early merit scholarship deadlines. And IIRC the Chicago and MIT EA programs are open.
If some students are violating the rules though that’s not good. From what I hear counselors at some of the private feeder schools, at least, enforce the restrictions as a student breaking the rules reflects badly on the high school. Likely counselors are not monitoring this at a big public high school where counselors have 500+ students each though.
I have heard of some of the feeder schools even having internal rules that go beyond the SCEA ones e.g. if a student is admitted early to Princeton, they won’t allow them to apply RD to Harvard, Yale or Stanford. This makes sense as over time it would seem to increase the odds of getting admitted for students from those high schools.
Yes, what you’ve said is similar to what I have heard. I heard just last week that Harvard has an unwritten rule that if a kid is accepted early and does not attend it can ruin the relationship with the HS. I imagine this holds true for the other elites.
Kids are violating the rules. I’ll leave it at that. It’s their risk.
To calculate your odds as a white, unhooked American who is OOS, you need to remove all the groups who are not you. And then basically split that number in half for male/female.
So the groups that come out are:
Legacy
Athlete
International
NJ
URM
Asian
Development
One would need to trim them from the numbers we knew to account for cross over.
And then assume acceptance rates for each of those groups to come down to the pool left and the number of slots left.
My guess would be 115 unhooked white spots not in one of those groups for a 9% accept rate.
^^ You can add First Generation to that list which is about 15% of the admitted class (deducting for overlaps) and Public vs. Private school (65/35?).
Pretty sobering numbers for a middle class, white, unhooked OOS male who goes to public school. 9% seems generous.
Perhaps the title of the thread should have really been “Why is Princeton SCEA admission rate so low?” lol