Regular-decision acceptance rate rises
While Yale’s overall acceptance rate hit a record-low this admissions season, for applicants in the regular decision pool, getting into Yale was slightly easier than last year.
The initial acceptance rate in the regular decision pool rose to 5.4 percent from 4.8 percent at this time last year, according to figures released by the University earlier this week. Comparatively, the acceptance rate in the early action round dropped to 13.4 percent from 18.1 percent last year.
So is the Yale Admissions Office intentionally shifting the proportion of admitted students in favor of...
In asking its applicants to forego applying early to any other institution, Yale should be giving a preference in admissions to those who apply early. Otherwise, applicants should forego Yale and apply to other peer early action schools such as Stanford, MIT and Caltech instead.
@#2, you're wrong on two counts:
a) Stanford is also Single-Choice Early Action, so they're asking the same of their early applicants.
b) The type of students who would rather come to Yale (and thus apply early) are probably not the ones who would want to go to MIT/Caltech. I have lots of friends at both those places - they agree that they fit in better there, where it's all science, engineering, and math, while people like me fit in better here, where there's a balance of science, social science, and humanities. It's not that one school is necessarily "better" than the others, it's where applicants feel they will get the most out of their education.
Question -- are the deferred students counted twice then, when looking at the number of applicants/admit rate?
The answer to your question is it depends who's trying to spin the stats to buttress their point.
Ideally, admissions data should be divided into 3 sections: (1) for early applicants admitted/denied/deferred; (2) deferred early applicants later admitted or denied; and (3) "regular" applicants admitted or denied. The University compiles this data and reports it to the ASC, but does not release it to the Yale Daily News.
The last numbers I saw showed that, interestingly, deferred early applicants are admitted later at twice the rate for "ordinary" applicants in the regular pool. Whether this is because the admissions office assumes (correctly) that these folks will matriculate at a higher rate, or for some for some other reason, I do not know.
The bottom line is that there are vastly different admit rates and yield rates for applicants and admits in each of these three categories.
Nice spin.