18.6% SCEA admit rate for Princeton: https://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S45/02/99M42/index.xml?section=topstories
@DeepBlue86 While Stanford has about one thousand more applicants, The main reason for what you said is that Stanford rarely defers students. They reject 81% of applicants.
Agreed, @Soheils , but given that they had significantly more applicants than Harvard, that their admit rate was substantially lower than Harvard’s, and, as I said, they rejected more applicants than Harvard had applicants, I think they’re clearly the most selective institution as of now.
@DeepBlue86 I agree, they are the most selective institution right now. My understanding of your society may be wrong, but I think Stanford’s increasing selectivity signals a shift in attitudes towards a more “pre-professional” college experience that is geared towards getting a job right after graduation (Which is completely fine). Please correct me if I am wrong.
^^ Most Harvard graduates have a job right after graduation. So, I don’t think Stanford’s selectivity has anything to do with jobs upon graduation. In a recent survey of Harvard seniors . . .
I’m not sure how that compares to Stanford graduates.
@gibby ,I don’t doubt that most Stanford and Harvard graduates find jobs after they graduate. Without doing any research, I would guess proportionally more Harvard graduates find jobs in finance and consulting, while proportionally more Stanford graduates aim to get into the tech industry. The latter category is more fashionable right now, so that probably underpins some of Stanford’s popularity.
More to the point that @Soheils is making, IIRC, a significantly higher proportion of Harvard’s graduates are liberal arts majors than Stanford’s. Liberal arts majors don’t preclude employment in the kinds of jobs I believe Harvard grads get in the greatest numbers, but aren’t as straightforward a path into the tech industry. This also may support the view that Stanford is somehow more “pre-professional” than Harvard.
I think the reasons are more varied than that.
– Long-term demographic trend of U.S. population shifting west and south.
– Stanford is by far the most engineering-centric of elite private comprehensive research universities, and engineering has more prestige now than at any time in the past century.
– Special strength in computer science, also with more prestige than ever now.
– Silicon Valley has been a global business center for a whole generation now – a real rival to Wall Street and Washington, and completely eclipsing Route 128, all places traditionally oriented toward Harvard and Ivies.
– Much less competition regionally for Stanford from other private institutions.
– Elite sports competition at Stanford, and a growing trend of students valuing that.
– Huge start-up culture attracts entrepreneurial students who want to start a company and get it funded long before they graduate (somewhat to the dismay of Stanford faculty).
– The weather is a lot nicer at Stanford, and more prospective students have grown up in suburbs, so it doesn’t bother them that Stanford looks a lot like a suburban office park.
All true, @JHS - well said.
I noticed a small (but I thought interesting) point about Yale’s results. Here are the (similar) descriptions of the SCEA results, from the Yale Daily News and the University’s press function:
http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2015/12/15/yale-accepts-17-percent-of-early-applicants/
http://news.yale.edu/2015/12/15/795-early-action-applicants-admitted-class-2020
This year, Yale accepted 795 applicants out of an SCEA pool of 4,662. I believe the largest number in recent memory that they’d previously accepted early was 761, five years ago. That year, they accepted 1,245 candidates RD, for a total of 2,006, also the largest number in recent memory (the following two years, SCEA admits fell substantially, related to Harvard and Princeton restoring early admissions in 2011).
Yale says it’s planning to accept another 1,200 - 1,300 candidates, with the objective of ending up with a class of about 1,360 (very close to the size of the current freshman class). If they accept 1,200 RD, it will mean that they’ve accepted 1,995 total, nearly as many as five years ago. This year, however, they accepted 51 QuestBridge candidates, which they say is more than double the number they accepted two years ago (and prior years were probably lower than that, given that Yale only began partnering with QuestBridge in 2007). So I don’t see how they accept even 1,200 RD unless they’re expecting overall yield to go down, or for the yield on QuestBridge students to be particularly low.
I noticed this because I tried to extrapolate how many students Yale was likely to admit RD, knowing that there seems to be an unwritten rule that SCEA admits hover around 38% of total admits (although it was 38.4% last year, the highest in recent memory) and that overall admits tend to hover in the mid to high 1,900s and have only exceeded 2,000 once in recent memory.
Where this leads is that if they’re really going to admit between 1,200 and 1,300 candidates it’s likely that the total number of admits will be a new high, implying that they’re expecting yield to fall below normal in the RD round. That would be consistent with this year’s unusually large number of admits in the SCEA round, where yield is expected to be higher than average. I would guess, in any case, that the number of RD admits is going to be closer to 1,200 than 1,300.
@DeepBlue86 : Maybe what’s going on is that Yale is ramping up for the two new residential colleges expected to open for the 2017-2018 school year. The projection of a class of 1360 “for enrollment in the fall of 2016” could very well exclude a number of students admitted in the current cohort but deferring their enrollment to the class of 2021 in the fall of 2017. That could happen based on normal admission/enrollment patterns – this coming fall’s class will already include students who were admitted last year but deferred their enrollment, but maybe Yale has reason to expect that there will be more deferrals in this cohort than there were last year. It could also happen if Yale decides to do something I don’t think it has ever done, but which Harvard (and a few others) has been doing for years: It offers some students admission contingent on their willingness to defer enrollment for a year and to spend their gap year doing something interesting.
That group – the so-called “Z List” – may number 80-100 or more from year to year. Harvard seems to use it most often with legacy applicants, although a few non-legacies seem to be Z-listed as well every year. Sometimes Z-list offers are made in March, and sometimes they are made in late spring to people on the waiting list.
It would make all the sense in the world for Yale to smooth out its projected 2017 enrollment increase by admitting a relatively large group of Z-listers this spring. I have no information that’s going to happen, but I won’t be surprised in the least if it does.
I agree – @JHS is onto something (although I personally feel that that particular suburban office park has a resort-like vibe.) 
Increasingly, there’s an interest in cross-disciplinary work, and a school that has strong engineering programs offers some opportunities for cross-pollination that one without does not. I suspect that Harvard is well aware of this or it wouldn’t have decided to use that Paulson gift to start an engineering school.
It’s interesting you say that, @JHS , because the thought had occurred to me that it would be logical for Yale to employ a Z-list in the year before class size is scheduled to rise by 15%. They have no roadmap for how many applicants they should accept to end up at the new, higher target, and if they want to minimize the likelihood of ending up with too few or too many, a yield management tool like the Z-list would be useful.
“start”? lol
And I am pretty sure that Paulson specifically donated to the SEAS.
So I’m continuing to play with those Yale numbers and am coming up with some results that provide food for thought (if you’re as interested in the minutiae of this subject as I am):
Back when Yale used to disclose the yield from early action and regular admissions (up until about five years ago, as far as I can tell), EA yield was reportedly about 88%, falling to 80% the first year Harvard and Princeton restored early action and then rebounding somewhat. This is based on some old CC threads, which state that you could calculate this from the Common Data Set info. RD yield was reportedly about 60% back then. I have been unable to verify this, but it doesn’t sound unreasonable.
It seems to be important to Yale (i) to try to admit at least half the class from the RD pool and (ii) to keep its overall yield within spitting distance of 70% (last year it was 69.5%). Let’s just say for the sake of argument that the current yield on Yale’s SCEA admits is about 85%. That implies that of the 753 applicants admitted SCEA last year, 640 would have enrolled, accounting for some 47% of the 1,364 enrolled freshmen. This implies that 60% (724) of the 1,210 applicants admitted RD in 2014 enrolled.
This year, Yale has admitted 795 applicants SCEA, so if this pool has an 85% yield, 676 students will enroll. If Yale really wants to have a freshman class of 1,360, then this group will account for 49.7% of them. So far, so good. If, as Yale says, though, they plan to admit another 1,200 to 1,300 applicants RD, and that group has a 60% yield, then Yale will end up with between 36 and 96 students too many.
(N.B.: I am not attempting to deal with the effect of the 51 QuestBridge students already admitted, since I have no idea what their yield will be and Yale said it’s planning to admit another 1,200 - 1,300 in any case. Additionally, I haven’t made any provision for students previously admitted who have voluntarily taken a gap year before matriculating with the class of 2020; I assume they will be balanced by the number admitted this year who will choose to take a gap year before enrolling with the class of 2021.)
All the more reason, then, to be unsurprised if Yale introduces a Z-list this year. If Yale admitted 1,200 students RD this year, and Z-listed 60 of them, assuming the yield numbers above, it would enroll a freshman class of 1,360 (of which just under half would come from the SCEA round) and would have a 70.3% yield, an increase which would be viewed positively. Its yield next year might be even higher, all things being equal, since the vast majority of the 60 Z-listers would be expected to enroll, which would in turn have the effect of significantly reducing the uncertainty around how many to admit in a year when the freshman class is increasing by 15%.
“Start” was the wrong word. There has been increased attention to engineering in the last decade which seems to have coincided with the renaming of SEAS in the 2007. Yes, Paulson did donate to SEAS but at the guidance of Harvard… Because of who it was and the size, his gift received a fair amount of coverage by folks who follow education and philanthropy (as well as those who can’t stand to see a good deed go unpunished.) The general consensus – I am not an insider so can’t say --, was that Paulson was willing to make a gift to Harvard wherever it was needed most (rather than to the B-School where he has an affiliation). After working with them, it was decided that it would have the greatest impact if it went to SEAS. It seems that he agreed to Harvard’s choice and they agreed to put his name on it. As the gift was explained, new facilities in Allston and the ability to compete with Stanford (among other things) seemed to be major talking points, and it was positioned as a new initiative.
Hey @DeepBlue86
I’ve plugged in HYP numbers for the Class of 2020, to see what % of total applicants applied SCEA this year.
Harvard
Class of 17: SCEA = 13.86% (of total applications)
18: SCEA = 13.68%
19: SCEA = 15.86%
20: SCEA = 15.8% of total applicant pool
Yale
17 = 15.26
18 = 15.35
19 = 15.5
20 = 14.8% of total applicant pool
Princeton
17 = 14.37
18 = 14.46
19 = 14.0
20 = 14.4% of total applicant pool
With all 3 reporting record numbers of total applications, these percentages are pretty consistent. Princeton saw a fairly significant jump in Early Applications, one that was echoed by the total number of applicants. Interesting that Yale also had a record number of total applicants, but the percentage of those people applying SCEA went down a little. Not great news for someone - like me - whose kid was deferred there to RD.
It is interesting to me how consistent these numbers are. I guess the Admissions Departments can make pretty good projections about total number of applications expected, based on how many they get in SCEA.
I haven’t seen the number of total applicants for Stanford yet. But based on their 7822 SCEA applicants, and the growing percentage of their applicants that have applied early over the last 4 years, I will predict 43,455 total applicants.
Doubly grim on the Yale front, @baltimoreguy , because while the number of SCEA applicants as a percentage of the total pool was lower than in recent years, the actual number accepted SCEA (795) was larger than I think it’s ever been. Assuming a fixed number of total admits (~2000), the odds don’t look good for RD and deferred applicants. I feel your pain, but would just note that by applying SCEA your kid made Yale feel a lot more confident he’ll come if they admit him, which has to count for something. Also, if Yale introduces a Z-list (which wouldn’t surprise me, as noted above), the picture improves.
Yale is expanding its class size by 200 or so this year. The admission target is probably at least 2,200, and maybe closer to 2,300.
^^ I thought they were doing this starting with the class of 2021 not 2020.