Agree! There is probably a greater proportion of no-interview admits in the SCEA pool for all of the reasons you have indicated.
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Someone at my school has an interview request but it was significantly out of their region. Is that unusual?
Is it with a Yale senior or an alum?
Being curious, does it make difference if you are interviewed by a Yale Senior or an alumni?
No, my impression is just that the Yale seniors are being used to fill gaps where the alums arenât able to cover.
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Eh, this source from Yale says they interviewed 20,000 applicants: Number of alumni interviews sets record - Yale Daily News
Interestingly, a Yale ASC Chair said this: âInterviews are correlated with higher rates of acceptance, Williamson said, though he noted that this may be because alumni are able to interview a greater portion of the early applicant pool, which typically has a higher acceptance rate than the regular pool. Furthermore, with limited resources, ASC Area Directors may direct interviewers toward schools where students are seen as having a greater chance of admission, he said.â
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Consistent with my experience and discussions with AOâs.
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This article is dated (2016). The most recent figure is approx 9,000 completed reports, so maybe 10k± interviews given.
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It was an alumni interview very far from where my friend lives
Thatâs interesting. The FAQs say they will not reassign you to a different ASC, but maybe this interviewer is associated with your ASC despite their current location. Or maybe it is just an anomaly.
As another poster pointed out, that is from a different era. There are a lot of cross-currents given what we know of the new era, and while my personal guess is that the interviewee pool would likely still have at least a somewhat higher acceptance rate than the total pool in RD, I really donât know about the SCEA round.
Indeed, I was just reflecting on the SCEA round again, and thinking how it is entirely possible interviewees could have a lower frequency of rejection, but then a higher frequency of deferral, and then a lower frequency of admission. Or not, but that is one of the scenarios that would be consistent with what Yale has been saying in this era, and what we (think) we know about the composition of the SCEA pool.
But then of course deferral isnât an option in the regular round. Although waitlisting is . . . .
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Oh wow, thatâs a pretty considerable decrease.
Even after interviews became selective, I have interviewed candidates from outside my ASC region. They tend to be from large metro areas (so lotâs of applicants) but probably fewer alums/volunteers. They also tend to be late in the process when the regional director may have problems getting a volunteer that can make the report deadline.
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hii i applied REA but havenât finished my CSS profile yet; i havenât received an email from admissions about it either so is my application is still valid if i submit it late? a little stressed about this
You guess as to what fraction of SCEA applicants are serious and would, on first examination, be seen as being above the barm as opposed to those just throwing something in to take a shot?
I would be reluctant to put a number on it, including because it seems really complicated to me.
Like, we know recruited athletes usually go through a pre-read process, almost always apply ED I/REA/SCEA, and have a very high admission rate when they do all that. As a percentage of applicants in Yale SCEA that will not necessarily be a huge number, but as a percentage of ADMITS in SCEA, now I think you are talking about a significant fraction.
Legacies tooâthere is no pre-read per se for legacies, but I think a lot of legacies get really good advising and in that sense get an informed assessment of whether it is worth applying ED I/REA/SCEA wherever they have legacy status. Nonetheless I am sure the legacy admit rate in Yale SCEA is lower than the recruited athlete admit rate, but I also at least suspect that legacies make up a material percentage of SCEA admits.
Other hooks I am less sure about just because I donât know if there is so often going to be the same sort of high-quality advising steering well-qualified people to Yale specifically. Iâm sure there are some really highly qualified other-hook people in the Yale SCEA pool, I am just less sure it is a big difference from hooked applicants in the RD pool.
OK, then you have unhooked applicants, and honestly I donât really know for sure about them. It is sort of interesting to me because I know at my feederish HS, enough of the high numbers people are recruited athletes or legacies that it is actually materially reducing the pool of really high-quality applicants who would be applying unhooked to Yale or such ED I/REA/SCEA. Like, that high numbers Williams recruit or Princeton legacy probably could have been a strong candidate for Yale SCEA too, but they are applying to those colleges and not Yale in this round for obvious reasons.
Of course if things donât work out, some may show back up in the RD round (including deferrals, of course). But in SCEA, I do think this filtering effect might be meaningfully cutting back on the competitiveness of the unhooked SCEA applicant pool.
And then of course there are a bunch of unhooked people maybe applying frivolously to Yale SCEA (just meaning a good advisor would tell them they are not actually competitive). But again, a lot of people may actually be prudent enough to actually ED/REA/SCEA somewhere more realistic for them, and some will not anywhere, so it again seems plausible to me that maybe most such people wait to throw in their Yale application if they get to the RD round.
But still, there are SOOOOOO many people these days throwing applications at colleges like Yale despite not really being realistically competitive. Even if most of them wait until RD to do that, just a minority percentage doing that in SCEA could still add up to a big percentage of SCEA applications (and presumably almost no SCEA admits).
So . . . who knows? I think everyone always says this round has a lower percentage of frivolous applications, which makes sense. But how much lower? I find it hard to guess.
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Great analysis. At our feeder HS, I can tell by looking at stats for the last few years that approximately one half of the SCEA applicants are taking a wild shot (being below the bar that the counseling office suggests for Yale early Applicants). Of course, some are more âwildâ than others, with GPAs etc far below where they ought to be.
Yeah, I have seen something similar and I was a little surprised because I know this is likely going against the counselorsâ advice in many of those cases.
In fact, I know they basically draw a line between what we call reaches and what we call unlikelies, and they try to discourage people from applying to any unlikelies, and certainly against using a restrictive slot on an unlikely.
But it sure appears to me a decent number of people do it anyway to some of these colleges. I guess I was expecting more of our families/kids to be immune to the pressures to do that sort of thing, and I do think it is fewer than it could be, but definitely not as few as I suppose I was hoping.
That said, I can also see the large majority of rejects to these colleges were RD applications. Many of those also seem unlikely, but obviously that is way less of an issue (although still not a complete non-issue in my mind).
@NiceUnparticularMan This is pure speculation on my part based on the responses that I have seen on this board and coming to an understanding that the auto accepts (likely a very small percentage of the accepted population and even smaller portion of the overall applicant pool) and auto rejects(high number of total applicant pool) will not likely get interviews. Therefore the most likely pool of candidates to interview are the students who get passed the inital screen, be it SCEA or RD, yet need more consideration. WIth this subset you have narrowed the pool down considerably. I could be very wrong but that is my interpretation of what I have heard/ read.
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Re rejectsâŠit is a bit hard to say on a proportionate basis how different REA is from RD: Of the 750+ REA admits in previous years, approximately 250 are athletes and 175 are legacies (for a total of between 400 and 450) legacy + athletes. This is 325 from the rest. Out of about 6500-7000 non legacy, non athlete applicants in REA. Is this number that different from the RD pool?