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If you do the math, all it means is that Harvard's yield, taking into account the lack of EA and the liberalization of financial aid, didn't go up significantly compared to previous years, and actually may have gone down a tad. If it has 125 slots open, that equates to a 78% yield on the students it accepted in April, compared to 79% last year. It accepted a meaningfully smaller number of students this year because no one knew how yields would play out, and it didn't want its third overstuffed class in a row. It's possible that Harvard's yield didn't go down at all -- the 125-150 range may reflect fewer than 125 spaces, but an assumption that yield from the waitlist won't be 100%.
There will be some domino effect, I'm sure, but it's likely to be pretty diffused. Those 125 students could be coming from 40-50 other colleges. If a few other colleges at the top of the food chain do something similar, the effect could be much bigger. But the article indicates that Stanford doesn't plan to use its waitlist at all except for any effect from other colleges' waitlists (i.e., Harvard), and that Yale is more in the 40 student range. (Which, of course, is completely consistent with Harvard's yield not going up as much as people feared it would.)
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