<p>Yale</a> sees 5.8 percent increase in appsCross Campus | Yale Daily News</p>
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<p>I would actually expect the admit rate to fall even further than that, because Yale can probably expect a slightly higher yield this year given that H and P have reinstated their early action programs.</p>
<p>^ Agree. Not trying to tell Dean Brenzel how to crunch his numbers but I think the yield has to go up with the H and P SCEA reinstatement so I can’t see the number of admits being the same as last year.</p>
<p>The boost to the yield rate might not be as great as you envision, since the overlap group with Harvard was only 150 or so larger last year, I believe, than it was for the Class of 2011, for which Harvard and Yale both had early admissions. </p>
<p>I do agree that there should be fewer than 2,100 admits however - perhaps closer to 2,025 after wait list action - if the yield rate jumps 2.5%.</p>
<p>Why would SCEA at other schools make a difference? Honest query, I just don’t understand why.</p>
<p>people who applied to yale SCEA are likely interested in going to Yale with a much higher accept rate than in the past where some might have been waiting to see if they can get into Harvard or Princeton but would not know until April.</p>
<p>To Moonman676:</p>
<p>A certain number of people apply to several Ivies, Stanford, Duke, MIT etc., with the idea that they will go to the best school they get into, their preliminary “favorite” if they get in, or the school that offers them the best financial aid. Those applying to several of these schools are in the “common applicant pool.”</p>
<p>When Princeton and Harvard dropped early programs after the Class of 2011, the SCEA pool at Yale jumped from 3,596 to 4,888, and the assumption was that a sizable fraction of the increase was people who really preferred to go to Harvard or Princeton - given a choice - but who basically took a “what the hell” approach, applying early to Yale since it wasn’t binding and they had nothing else to do before regular apps were due at Harvard and Princeton on January 1.</p>
<p>This year, SCEA apps at Yale dropped around 1,000 from last year, and the assumption is that those “lost” were to some extent people who applied SCEA to Harvard or Princeton, which they couldn’t have done last year.</p>
<p>Clearly there is a lot of game-playing: (1) by people applying early, who know the early admit rate is higher than the “regular” rate, and that their odds of admission are greater at some schools than others; and (2) by the colleges themselves, who smoke out those most inclined to enroll by offering an exclusive early action program, preventing other schools from “signing” anyone from their exclusive pool for 90 days, and holding onto a large number of those positively inclined toward the school by “deferring” them to the regular pool, from whence, I believe, they are admitted at a greater rate than the poor shlumps who are REAL “regular” applicants. </p>
<p>For a number of reasons, including simple inertia, those who are admitted early often “settle” for that school rather than going through the hassle of applying “regular” to other schools, even if, initially, they might have preferred one of those other schools, even if only by a small margin.</p>
<p>Since SCEA yield rates are higher - sometimes substantially higher - than “regular” yield rates, schools like to admit as many as possible from the early pool, and hate to see people they have their eye on applying to somebody else’s SCEA pool.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the assumption is that since Yale’s risk of losing SCEA admits to Princeton and Harvard is somewhat reduced if those whose SCEA application to Yale was merely tactical are eliminated in advance, that the SCEA yield rate (and to a lesser degree the overall yield rate) should now rise.</p>
<p>It looks like that the numbers for Harvard and Princeton are not looking good. It could be a surprise if Harvard’s number is smaller than Yale’s.</p>
<p>While the institution (or, in this case, the reinstitution) of an early program can have at least a short term negative impact on applications to the regular pool, it is unlikely to have the great impact you suggest. </p>
<p>I can see a leveling off of the Harvard application total, or a minor decline akin to that at Penn, but certainly not the 17-18% decline that would be necessary to achieve a “number that is smaller than Yale’s.”</p>
<p>I certainly do not hope so. But at this point, it seems that Harvard is trailing Yale in everything this year, so far.</p>
<p>Not football!</p>
<p>Oh, I thought that we were talking about weather. :)</p>
<p>My early prediction: </p>
<p>The yield rate will rise 3% to about 67%, due the re-adoption of SCEA at Harvard and Princeton, and increasing use of likely letters, so that there will be no more than 2,015 total admits - down from 2,109 last year.</p>
<p>This means, with a class target size of 1,350, an overall admit rate of around 7%. The admit rate will be much lower, of course, for “regular” pool applicants.</p>