Top Colleges Dig Deeper in Wait Lists for Students

[mammall]

The 150-175 statement in the Crimson and quoted from the head of admission's email has since been somewhat retracted. Harvard announced late last week that actual firm number will be disclosed in the coming week.

[wjb]

Yes, a Yale (or Stanford) SCEA admit does cause many students to shorten their lists. Based on my son's experience as an SCEA admit this year, though, it causes very few to withdraw all other applications. (Yale had a Facebook page for early admits, and they did plenty of communicating.) Kids who needed to compare financial aid packages left most or all apps alive. Of those for whom financial aid was not a concern, most kept alive at least a handful of apps, generally to other super-selective schools. And a surprising number of students who were not eligible for financial aid withdrew no applications after receiving a SCEA admit, just to see where else they'd get in. So much for shrinking the pool of applicants.

[ParentOfIvyHope]

OP: Thanks for the link it is really a good news after such a tough admission year. 150 is almost 10% of Harvard freshperson class, so it is a big number. I wish good luck to couple of very well deserving students at D school.

[wjb]

^^^It is indeed a big number, one that will send shock waves down the food chain for several months.

[Ijmom]

Mammall,
What is the source for "The 150-175 statement in the Crimson and quoted from the head of admission's email has since been somewhat retracted."?

[fireflyscout]

It was in an article in the New York Times last week.

[wjb]

The retraction was in the NY Times?

[Ijmom]

Here is the extract from the NY Times article..
"In an e-mail message sent on Thursday to colleagues at dozens of other institutions and passed on to The New York Times, William Fitzsimmons, the Harvard College dean of admissions, said, “Harvard will admit somewhere in the range of 150 to 175 from the waiting list, possibly more depending on late May 1 returns and other waiting list activity.”

[wjb]

Here's a link to the full NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/ed...gewanted=print

The opening line:

In what may be a happy surprise for thousands of high school seniors, Harvard plans to offer admission to 150 to 175 students on its waiting list, and Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania each expect to take 90, creating ripples that will send other highly selective colleges deeper into their waiting lists as well.

No retraction there. Is there a subsequent retraction?

[jym626]

There was an article in our local paper tody about addmissions, waitlists, etc. In it, they said the email from Harvard about the expected numbers they were anticipating taking from the waitlist was "leaked".

[JHS]

Re: Harvard. I stand by my earlier post. The fact that it may take that many kids off the waitlist doesn't reflect gaming at all. Given the EA change and the massive financial aid changes, as well as its severe over-admissions the last two years, the only prudent thing for Harvard to do was to admit based on a projected increase in yield. When the initial yield was essentially unchanged, it used its waitlist. That's what they're for.

Re: Chicago. I heard Michael Behnke say on Saturday that their yield had gone up to 38% and they essentially were not going to use the waitlist except for very specific needs.

[CountingDown]

Re: EA acceptances -- S was admitted EA to two of his top four choices (reach and super-reach). With those two in hand, he dropped three from the list at that point -- and probably should have dropped two more as well, as none of those five had a realistic shot of winning over his heart after his EA success.

He started with ten, applied to seven. Five would have done it -- but it's easy to say that now. It could have gone quite differently. He had good, well-considered reasons for all of them. The four he wanted the most, he got into. Worked for us!

[ellemenope]

interesting that Harvard's yield has remained essentially unchanged. You would have thought that with all of the increased aid to the middle class that it instituted this past year that its yield would have gone up. Other colleges have obviously instituted similar programs--all to the good of middle class families.

[DSC]

Well, they also got rid of EA. So some Harvard people got in to Yale of Stanford 4 months before the heard a thing from Harvard, and they may have applied to Harvard EA if that was still an option. So I think that explains the difference. I would expect their yeild among the people getting new aid to have increased, but have dropped slightly in other groups.

[originaloog]

The high wait list numbers are merely a reaction to the increasingly difficult nature in accurately estimating the yeild from the acceptance pool because of the increasing number of application many student submit and perhaps the merit scholarship arms race employed by the second eschelon of universities.