<p>i’ll give my personal experience. i knew a lot of people that were accepted SCEA with me last year, and a very significant number of us were also admitted to harvard. what i found was that, among us, even the ones who had said that yale might not be the first choice, the vast majority (definitely not the 35/65 ratio from the revealed preferences study) ended up choosing yale because yale did SUCH a good job of recruiting its early admits. we got individual calls from heads of departments, we got SO many handwritten letters from students and admissions officers, we got the amazing admits website, we got it all. </p>
<p>and i actually reading an article in the crimson–the one that reported harvard’s yield for the class of 2012–that said that for the yale scea and harvard cross-admits, harvard probably lost close to, if not more than, half of those students to yale because we already had 3 months of imagining ourselves as yale students before we even heard from h or p.</p>
<p>so even if yale is “flooded” with potential harvard/princeton cross-admits, those students are really going to grow to love yale during the 3 month period between scea decisions are released and RD are released. and believe me, no student admitted SCEA is arrogant enough to say “oh, i only got into yale…i’m going to be accepted to harvard in a few months, so let me ignore the fact that i got into yale.” most early admittees, even the one whose first choice was not originally yale, come to love love love the school after 3 months of hardcore recruitment.</p>