Should colleges be permitted to enforce Early Decision agreements by sharing admittance lists?
(Possible Pay Wall):
https://www.wsj.com/articles/williams-wesleyan-middlebury-among-targets-of-federal-early-admissions-probe-1523439000
Related story:
https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2018/04/09/justice-department-starts-investigation-early-decision-admissions
I’m really mixed on this. My D was accepted to Wesleyan early decision in December. We signed an agreement and my daughter immediately withdrew her applications from the other schools. Of course we would have liked to have known if she was going to be accepted at the others; but that would have been dishonest. I’m not sure what the best way is to ethically handle this issue.
There is already a very active thread going on the topic. Join in. No need for another one.
Can this affect the waitlist acceptance rate?
Sorry, @doschicos , It’s the small college grad in me. I’ve seen the other thread. It’s already about eleven pages long! I started this one when it was revealed that LACs were the particular target of the probe. One thing that often gets lost in these raging ED debates is the role played in its development specifically by Wesleyan and four other LACs: Amherst, Williams, Bowdoin and Dartmouth (back in the early days of the Ivy League when D was still considered a LAC) often referred to as “the Pentagonals”. It was designed as a way to give the smaller New England colleges a way of competing with HYP for the better prep school kids, as per this article in Atlantic from sixteen year ago:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/09/the-early-decision-racket/302280/
The Wesleyan forum is a seminar room, not a lecture hall. 
Excellent question! Any takers?
This article in Globe provides a few details from AOs. I don’t feel like there is enough information to know why DoJ is interested in the data. Many details not disclosed in all the articles I’ve read so far. For example, are they interested in the information sharing and privacy aspect of this, or the perceived “collusion” if colleges make admissions decisions based on shared information. What part of the ED agreement is legally binding? Would this “problem” be solved if AOs who practice information-sharing clearly notified families that of possibility information might be shared (to reduce likelihood someone would “game” the system)? Does this have anything to do with the ongoing DoJ investigation into affirmative action issues at Harvard?
In answer to @pfdgjb , I think if you look at ED as one piece of a general strategy of yield control, then, eliminating it or severely limiting its effectiveness, would seem to put extra pressure on the other piece - “the back end”, as it were - which would be the waitlist. Of the two, WL is the least efficient since it occurs so late in the process. The question is, should the Adcom over-admit, in the hopes of capturing as many top students as possible during RD or should they under-admit, and protect their yield?
The former would shred their yield since in a protracted RD process, and in accord with the Atlantic article, the top NE colleges would be far more prone to overlap with HYP (and, Brown in the case of Wesleyan) than they would even with each other. Nevertheless, once the air was cleared, there would be no need for a waitlist.
OTOH, under-admitting would cause Wesleyan and other small colleges to swell their WL, if maintaining their yield were deemed a top priority. At the moment, Wesleyan has a yield in the mid to high 30s, perhaps a reflection of the enormous degree of overlap it has with bigger and better known research universities. So, it’s not an easy question to answer.
Others are welcome to chime in.
You can add Carleton to the list of colleges that have been notified, lending some weight to the notion that this investigation is focusing almost exclusively on the nation’s elite LACs. Why just them? We still don’t know:
https://apps.carleton.edu/carletonian/?story_id=1703230&issue_id=1703669
@Figuringitout1 IMHO, I wouldn’t question it. You followed the rules and did the right thing. Your D will be a better person having had you to show her the way =D>
@Figuringitout1 My D did the same and withdrew her other applications immediately. However, I did have a brief elevated blood pressure moment when I thought “what if the portal was updated incorrectly, and she didn’t really get in?” “Would she be able to reinstate her other applications?” So of course I made myself feel worse for a few days by reading every article about admission notification mistakes from the past 10 years. 
Not a proud moment from this admission cycle for sure.
@ClassOf2018P Oh, no. I had only heard of the Columbia admit error. Now I’m off down a rabbit hole to see what else I need to worry about :-S
With all of the M&A activity that the FTC and DOJ let go by, reducing competition and leaving consumers with fewer and fewer choices, this is where the federal government is going to spend its enforcement time and energy. Lovely.