Why is SCEA Acceptance Rate so much Higher?

<p>Very interesting analysis. I also have the numbers for the Class of 2017.</p>

<p>Harvard – 4856
Yale – 4520
Princeton – 3854
Stanford – 6103</p>

<p>So in addition to Harvard wresting back its position as school of choice among the Ivies, the other big story is Stanford. Since 2017, the “First Choice” pool has grown by 2,406 applicants from 19,333 to this year’s 21,739. Stanford’s number of applicants has grown by 1,194 - just under half of the new applicants during that time. Stanford continues to grow in popularity and prestige.</p>

<p>One other note - Stanford’s SCEA acceptance rate went from 10.8 last year to 10.2 this year. Harvard’s went from 21.1 to 16.5. Princeton went up from 18.5 to 19.9; if I had to bet, I would bet that Yale’s also goes up about a point - it just makes sense that when a school gains market share in early applications, its selectivity increases (as with Stanford and Harvard) and when it loses market share, its selectivity will go down a bit (as with Princeton). Last year’s Yale SCEA admit rate was 15.4 - we will see tomorrow how strong of an analyst I am!</p>

<p>I think that is a good intuitive bet.</p>

<p>As for “Harvard wresting back its position as school of choice among the Ivies”, I think that needs to be qualified. It is school of choice among HYP as measured by SCEA applications, at least.</p>

<p>Penn is out there with 5390 early applications in 2019 (ED, not SCEA) and a 25% early admit rate in 2018. We all know early admissions can be used as a yield management tool, do not know if that is what Penn is doing.</p>

<p>I had predicted that Harvard’s SCEA acceptance rate was likely to go down as the numbers applying to Harvard would go up based on their signal last year. It might have been smarter to apply to Yale SCEA or Princeton. I am amazed Stanford’s rate continues to drop. </p>

<p>On a tangent…I tried to do the math last night for numbers accepted adding in other top schools and I think I came up with about 28,000 acceptances possible when adding up the top 12 or so schools that do ED and SCEA. It gives perspective for me that a top level student has a decent chance of getting in SOMEWHERE good.</p>

<p>Yep, Yale accepted 753 out of 4,693 applicants - 16 percent. So not quite the full point I predicted, but not insignificant.</p>

I note that after accepting 19.9% of its early applicants in 2014, Princeton saw a 9.4% increase in early applications for the class of 2020. Meanwhile, Yale, with a 16.0% acceptance rate in 2014, saw early applications drop by 0.6% in 2015. This seems to support baltimoreguy’s thesis.

That said, having started this arms race, Harvard will have to manage its position carefully. By signaling that applying early gives you a leg up, they increased their number of early applicants dramatically, to 5,919 in 2014, and reduced their acceptance rate to 16.5%. If they maintain or grow the number of early applicants, they’re either going to have to fill an uncomfortably large proportion of their freshman class from the early pool or see the early admit rate fall.

Any day now, Harvard will announce the number of early applicants for the class of 2020, and we’ll see how it’s going.

Thanks for bringing this thread back up @DeepBlue86

I had forgotten it and was finding myself interested in the posts before I realized that I had written a few of them! Totally slipped my memory.

So far we see Yale has held remarkably steady in EA apps for the 4th straight year. This year’s total of 4,663 is just 7 applications more than its 4-year running average. But, Wow, Princeton! An 8.7% increase from the average EA total of the previous 3 years (which had been even more remarkably constant than Yale’s numbers).

It will be very interesting to see if some of those applications came at the expense of Harvard, or if there are just more and more people applying EA to these schools. I feel like maybe both will be true - there are more EA apps to HYPS and Princeton captured a greater share of them than the 17.6% they had fallen to last year.

I’ll also expect Princeton to be more selective in EA admissions than last year’s 19.9 acceptance rate - particularly if it turns out they’ve captured a greater percentage of the HYPS EA apps.

I think there are too many cross-cutting variables, and too many relevant facts that aren’t disclosed, for anyone to be able to draw firm conclusions. My hunch, though, is that several things are going on at HYPS, most flagged by you and others on this thread:

  1. More and more students have looked at the relative EA/RD admit percentages and concluded that applying SCEA provides an edge, so there are more SCEA applications overall.
  2. H,Y and P (less so S) believe, probably correctly, that getting a student to apply SCEA materially increases the likelihood they'll matriculate there if admitted, so they'd like to get as many of their "top draft picks" as possible to apply SCEA to them rather than anywhere else.
  3. S's popularity is steadily increasing, and some (but not all) of its growth in SCEA applications is at HYP's expense.
  4. That said, H perceives that it and S are increasingly competing for the same students, particularly those who are STEM-focused.
  5. Among HYP, at least, if a school's SCEA admit rate approaches 20%, it takes SCEA market share from the others because of the increase in perceived edge to applying early there (less share is taken from S, I'm guessing, because it's somewhat different from HYP - it's on its own secular growth trend, it's in CA, is more STEM-oriented and has more big-time athletes who don't have to be admitted early).
  6. There's a natural equilibrium to this, though: if H, Y or P increases its SCEA admit rate and as a result receives more applications, it forces the school to choose between taking too many from the SCEA pool relative to the RD pool, or seeing its number of early applications fall because the perceived edge to applying early there is decreasing.
  7. Similarly, among HYP, when a school's SCEA admit rate falls to 16% or so, it starts to lose SCEA market share to the others because the SCEA edge is perceived to have decreased.
  8. S will face an interesting choice soon, I predict: at some point (absent a crash in the tech market), it'll have to choose between letting its SCEA admit rate fall below 10% or increasing the number of early applicants it accepts. I think if the SCEA admit rate falls below 10% and S doesn't lose much market share, people will start asking whether it's now left HYP behind and is in its own category.

H will probably release its SCEA numbers some day soon and they’ll contradict all of this, but I felt like going out on a limb…

Something else interesting is how HYPS’s number of SCEA applications relate to their overall application numbers.

Harvard
Class of 17: SCEA = 13.86% (of total applications)
18: SCEA = 13.68%
19: SCEA = 15.86%

Yale
17 = 15.26
18 = 15.35
19 = 15.5

Princeton
17 = 14.37
18 = 14.46
19 = 14.0

Stanford
17 = 15.71
18 = 16.47
19 = 17.17

Looks like they’re pretty consistent with the storyline above - Yale and Princeton very consistent, Harvard took a big leap last year, and Stanford keeps going up and up.

So interesting about Stanford - the percentage of SCEA apps to total apps keeps going up, even as the accept rate goes down. Maybe people figure that it’s their only shot at getting in, as slim as it might be. But I agree with @DeepBlue86 that at some point, people might feel like they’re wasting their SCEA bullet on Stanford, since even early it’s so hard to get into. I feel like we might be seeing peak Stanford this year (or even last ).

I’m really intrigued by Princeton this year. Does the big jump in SCEA numbers foretell a jump in total applications as the numbers above would seem to indicate, or did an inordinate number of its usual applicants decide to apply early there this year?

That’s interesting, baltimoreguy, and I think fleshes out the story a little. I would suggest that there’s been a marginal upward creep everywhere in the proportion of early apps, since, particularly with the growth of application numbers overall, it’s seen as one of the few ways to get an edge in a game that keeps getting harder. In the limited data we have, you see a bump at any school when the percent accepted of early applicants rises high enough to send a clear signal.

I’ll guess that you won’t see a jump in total applications at P beyond the amount that would have been expected from overall growth of the pool of candidates applying to HYPS. I think some P applicants chose SCEA over RD because of the near-20% acceptance rate, and a few - but not many - chose to apply early to P rather than H, Y or S for the same reason. I don’t see any other factor that would suddenly make P seem more appealing to the average elite candidate than H, Y or S.

I have nothing but anecdotal evidence in support of another hunch I have, which is that the growth in S numbers is being driven disproportionately by international - particularly Asian - applicants, and that it’s particularly rooted in the economic rise of China coupled with the ongoing tech boom. I hear enough stories about wealthy Chinese bidding up the real estate market in Palo Alto in order to send their kids to school in the US to make this explanation plausible to me. I also think these kinds of candidates often prefer H to Y and P because of the perceived brand superiority. Take a campus tour of H - you’ll be astonished by the crowds being led around by Mandarin-speaking guides (you see this also at S, much less at Y and P, in my limited experience). If China and/or the tech market crashes, I think you’ll see a noticeable dip in applications to S.

One more thought: I understand that each of HYP recruits ~200 athletes every year and admits the vast majority under SCEA rather than RD, but that S doesn’t have to admit its recruited athletes SCEA because it’s not bound by Ivy rules. If those statements are both true, it means that the SCEA admit rate for non-athletes at HYP is actually 3-4% lower than the overall SCEA admit rate because athletes take ~20% of the spots. Accordingly, the gap between SCEA admit rates at HYP on the one hand and S on the other may be smaller than it appears, for most applicants.

@DeepBlue86 even so… 20% - 4% is still about 3x higher than normal admit rate.

Harvard accepted 16.5% SCEA last year not 20%. Don’t forget that a huge percentage of the legacies that are admitted are accepted in the early rounds. Lots of other hooked students come through the early rounds. When all is said and done the early acceptance rate is single digits for unhooked kids.

Agreed, expertiger, but I was making a slightly different point, which is that although Stanford’s SCEA admit rate is stated to be ~10% while HYP’s are ~16-~20%, that might actually overstate the difference for non-athletes.

So, Harvard has released its SCEA numbers, and they have admitted 918 (14.8%, down from 16.5% last year) from the pool of 6,173 applicants (which rose 4.8% year over year). This is Harvard’s lowest early admit rate in recent memory, and reflects both the continuing rise in early applicants and a noticeable reduction in the number of students admitted early (I believe last year they took 977). It feels like they decided they needed to reserve a few more slots for the RD pool, given the punishingly low RD admit rate, but because early apps continued to rise, this had the effect of squeezing down the SCEA admit rate to what I think will be the lowest early admit rate in the Ivies. Interesting…

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/12/11/early-action-class-2020/

I’ve been eager to see these numbers @DeepBlue86 - thanks for posting

Harvard’s SCEA applicants are now up 31.5% in just two years from the 4692 for the Class of 2018. No wonder the acceptance rate went down - it had to, or, as you say, they would be filling so much of the class through EA. If the rate had stayed the same as last year’s 16.5%, they would have taken 1,018 SCEA students.

The number of SCEA applicants for HYP are up a total of 3.8% this year (with Yale slightly down) - will be interesting to see what happens with Stanford.

@baltimoreguy , I understand that Stanford will be providing admissions decisions at 4pm PST today, so I guess we’ll have their overall numbers tomorrow.

Regarding the point about hooked early applicants, @expertiger and @Falcon1 , there’s an interesting tidbit in the following article from yesterday about Brown’s early decision results: http://www.browndailyherald.com/2015/12/10/u-admits-22-percent-of-early-applicants/

Brown admitted 669 students, and stated that 24% of them were recruited athletes. I haven’t seen this figure disclosed elsewhere. 24% of 669 is 161. I recall that the Ivies typically admit around 200 recruited athletes apiece, so one could infer that about 80% of Brown’s recruited athletes came in through the ED round.

If 161 of the 918 students just admitted SCEA by Harvard were recruited athletes, that would imply that the non-athlete admit rate was 12.6% ((918-161)/(6173-161)). Assuming Stanford doesn’t use early admissions slots for athletes (because it’s not in the Ivy League and therefore doesn’t have to), Stanford’s 2014 and Harvard’s 2015 early admit rates (10.2% and 12.6%) are much closer than they initially appear.

Of course, when we see Stanford’s 2015 numbers tomorrow, the goalposts may have moved, so to speak!

Stanford admits 745 out of 7,822 - wow…http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/december/early-admit-announce-121115.html

The number of early applicants that Stanford REJECTED (6,376) was greater than the total number of early applicants to Harvard (6,173). I think Stanford’s out there by itself now. Detail here: http://www.stanforddaily.com/2015/12/11/9-5-percent-of-early-applicants-admitted-to-stanfords-class-of-2020/