Yale Daily News

It's too bad Yale still feels it has to rely on early admissions to prop up the yield rate. Harvard and Princeton have shown that its possible to consider all applicants on an even footing and survive - particularly f you have a strong financial aid program. I guess no change will be considered until we see how the new US News rankings come out and learn whether yield rate changes help vault Yale past Harvard, Princeton or both.

Yield is NOT a factor in US News rankings so there is no reason to keep early to artificially inflate yield (US News changed this several years ago).

Considering that early "action" is a nonbinding program, it allows students to still compare financial aid packages etc. I seriously doubt that by merely shifting the deadline back a few months you can ensure that a class is diverse: it seems that recruiting tactics, scholarships etc are far more influential than an arbitrary deadline. Princeton and Harvard thought that the world would follow, but Yale, MIT, Stanford, etc have held strong (by no means is it just Yale).

As for Princeton's move, early "decision" -- Princeton's former program -- is more unfair, but early "action" allows far more flexibility.

OF COURSE yield is a factor, since the admit rate is largely a function of the yield rate. Yale shouldn't have to rely on an early admissions program to boost the yield rate, but the feeling, apparently, is that without an early admissions program the overlap pool with Harvard and Stanford would grow too large. Yale stiil loses the bulk of common admits to Harvard, and split 50-50 with Stanford this year, though it has a slight edge over Princeton.

The admit rate is primarily a function of the number of applicants, not the yield rate. Even though Harvard and Princeton's yields went down significantly and they had to go much more to their waitlists, their overall admit rates stayed about the same because the vast number of applicants to HYPS etc is by and large the factor pushing the admit rate down, not the yield rate.

I don't know where you're getting your cross admit data: the most recent data is several years old and ranks H, Y, S, P.

Are you even an alum or just an internet troll? Please go discuss on one of those college forums and not here.

Sorry, By Sorry no, but to illustrate ...

If two schools have 20,000 applicants for a class of 1,000, and one has an 80% yield rate and the other a 50% yield rate, than the first school only needs to admit 1,250 to fill the class, and the second has to admit 2,000 to fill the class. The widely-differing admit rates are a function of the yield rate achieved.

At Yale, the yield rate for the majority of the class admitted via early decision is about 85%. For the minority of the class filled by applicants in the much larger regular pool is far lower.

On another point:

Rick Shaw, the admissions dean at Stanford (and formerly Yale) - recently informed his Faculty Senate about the percentage of the applicants offered admission to Stanford who enrolled in another institution.

"The data are from last year for the Class of 2011. For example, if the number of applicants offered admission to Stanford who chose to go elsewhere was approximately 700, 19% (133 in all) chose to attend Yale (in the Class of 2011).

"Last year Harvard took 27 percent of those that didn't enroll [at Stanford], Yale 19 percent, MIT, 15 percent, and Princeton 7 percent…These are consistently our top competitors."

Then Dean Shaw showed a table for this year's group (ie, the Class of 2012.) "The percent of non-enrolling students choosing Harvard remained at 27%, rose to 18.2% for Princeton, but dropped to 12.5% for Yale and 11% for MIT."

Said Dean Shaw, "This is not official yet, but I think it's important. Remember that Harvard and Princeton eliminated their early [admissions] programs. So we're seeing more overlap [now] with Princeton. Harvard is still first, [now] followed by Princeton [which jumped up two places over Yale and MIT]. Yale, then, is next. I don't know why I take some joy in the fact that now it's 80 (going to Yale) vs. 80 (going to Stanford). That's substantially changed over the last couple of years."

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/june18/minutes-061808.html

The yield rate for early action (not decision, by the way) is much higher than regular decision because people who have already decided that Yale is their top choice apply during that round. People are not more likely to go to Yale because they applied early; People apply early because they're more likely to go to Yale.

^^ That's fine and dandy, but it's actually not the case. The world isn't so ideal.

Yale's Early Action pool is being flooded by Harvard and Princeton hopefuls who intend to dump Yale after regular decision (if they're accepted to their top choices.) Plenty of people (I'm a student ambassador, so I've seen this time and time again) just throw in applications to Yale because we're an elite school with Early Action, not necessarily because Yale is their top choice.

By False, I totally agree with you. As a senior in high school I am surrounded with people who are applying to all sorts of colleges. I am not applying to any Ivy Leagues, but I know a lot of people with that mentality.