<p>JHS,</p>
<p>I think I’ll survive the moral scolding! We are a full freight family. If cost was not an issue for us (i.e., she qualified for FA) then she certainly would have withrawn from all but a very few in December. And just for the record, my D was actually just mid-range at her high school in terms of number of apps. Many kids submitted significantly more.</p>
<p>You can’t have it both ways, mammall. Earlier in this thread, you took the position that if H had not dropped its EA program, and if your daughter had been accepted to H SCEA, she would not have applied elsewhere. Now you say she kept all her apps alive after the Y SCEA acceptance because your family needed to compare financial aid offers. </p>
<p>It was your D’s right to collect as many acceptances as she could. There’s nothing illegal about it. But it is trophy hunting, pure and simple.</p>
<p>Oh please. Wjb - I forget where your child is headed but could it be Yale? In fact, my D most certainly would have called it quits for H if she had been accepted EA. And she didn’t submit after the Yale acceptance in December, they were already submitted.</p>
<p>Actually, at the scholarship finalist weekends she attended this spring there were a group of students who, like her, had been accepted EA at MIT or Yale or Stanford and were most certainly keeping their hats in the ring for merit at other schools. She was not at all unusual.</p>
<p>As to why she applied so many places? Partly due to CC - y’all had us convinced she had no chance at any of these places a year ago.</p>
<p>Really? Once your D was accepted at H, your posts indicated she could not decide between H, S, and Vanderbilt until close to May 1.</p>
<p>My guess is your D’s college application/selection process would not have played out any differently even if Harvard had still had EA.</p>
<p>I’ll say here, wearing both my just-another-parent hat and my moderator hat, that I heartily approve the freedom this country provides to families for young people to apply to as many or as few colleges as each applicant pleases. I don’t rag on people for applying to a lot of colleges, and I don’t rag on people for applying to just one. To each their own.</p>
<p>I think the Harvard EA termination (and I’ll use that as shorthand for Princeton, as well) will be judged, and should be judged, on one thing and one thing alone (maybe two things): did it increase the number and relative percentage of high-quality low-income applicants, and did it increase the relative percentage of enrolled students who are from low-income families?</p>
<p>That’s what Harvard said it was trying to achieve. (I think Harvard would insist those two things are only one thing.) That’s what pretty much everyone but the crazies thinks is an appropriate goal, one that would be admirable if achieved. And it’s a goal that, if achieved at a non-trivial level, might even justify some carbon emissions, or making the University of Chicago’s admissions staff read more applications.</p>
<p>And, although the financial aid intitiative muddies the waters a lot, it shouldn’t be too hard to evaluate, because there are a bunch of acceptable proxies as a control group: Yale, Stanford, MIT, etc. Did Harvard do a better job than they did of attracting economically diverse applicants, and admitting them?</p>
<p>(I don’t think it’s very likely. But I’m waiting to hear.)</p>
<p>(Yes, nell-ann. Princeton would have worked, too. It happened that in these cases Princeton offered no financial aid at all, though, because it – alone out of all collleges to which they applied – also failed to offer admission.)</p>
<p>I’d use only Yale & Stanford,. MIT has historically attracted a different pool of students & offered lower FA that HYPS.
But I would still feel more comfortable waiting a year or two to do the research.</p>
<p>Please pardon my post, but I really don’t see what the big deal is. You can get a great education at many many colleges. Why is everyone wasting time (imo) trying to analyze the system, it is what it is! It’s like going shopping, sometimes your in need of a particular item but the store that you need it from isn’t having a sale. Then the next week, after you already purchased it, it goes on sale at the store you originally looked at. Oh well, that’s life.</p>
<p>look over the colleges that you would like to apply to and if you like the way they do applications/acceptances then apply and if not, then don’t. very simple!</p>
<p>My son didn’t like what Princeton did a few years ago with the grade deflation, so guess what? he didn’t apply - simple</p>
<p>Guitar, this is not about what students should do but whether the abolition of EA/ED is accomplishing what HPUVA wish it to accomplish: reaching more low income students, having a more diverse pool of applicants and admits.</p>
<p>What does not make sense to me is why Harvard, which is obviously a private school operating according to its own rules, cannot evaluate its EA admits in terms of their socio-economic/disadvantaged status, then simply recruit or admit an acceptable number of needed disadvantaged students during RD round. Even if 850 “rich kids” end up being admitted EA, there are still 850 seats left to give out to the disadvantaged group. This procedure would be kindler and gentler (and cheaper) to the “ready and willing” EA applicants and the environment while providing a somewhat guaranteed yield to H. Unless the problem is as tokenadult raised, i.e., there would not be enough admin officers available to recruit disadvantaged applicants prior to the RD app. deadline because they would be preoccupied with the EA process.</p>
<p>I think it was partly marketing. It would not be enough to evaluate the EA applicants firmly so as to ensure that only those who would be admitted in the spring are admitted EA, if you do not get the applications from the less advantaged students to begin with. So eliminating EA was a high profile way to get the message out.</p>
<p>Harvard does match financial aid from Ivies other than Yale and Princeton.</p>
<p>If ya didn’t get in RD, ya didn’t get in. Am not sure why EA woulda helped.</p>
<p>In discontinuing EA harvard was acting in harvard’s perceived self-interest. Most top schools use ea/ed to mine the applicant pool for top minority candidates, e.g., stanford, mit. They do not typically lose these candidates because of fa issues and in any event there is an out from even the most restrictive of these for financial aid reasons. Therefore, harvard’s public justification that they are benefitting diversity by going to rd should be taken with a five-pound bag of salt. I suspect that Harvard found itself on the short end of too many ea/ed battles over minority applicants and believed, rightly or wrongly that if they could influence the other schools to abolish ea/ed (i.e. lead the lambs to the slaughter) they would win every head to head battle in rd. If the others dont follow harvard on this, expect harvard to go back to some form of ed/ea.</p>
<p>EA has a higher acceptance rate for a number of reasons. One is human nature as admissions is run by humans. When you have all of those spaces to fill, it is easier to accept a great candidate. When you have a stack of apps up to the ceilings and have only a few spaces left, every accept becomes ever so precious. You have to take into account what you already have accepted. Also there are not as many apps EA, and the counselors are fresh and ready to roll. Come January, they have tons of apps to read, things are in a frenzy, the spots are scarcer, they have read the same stuff over and over. Since you cannot reneg an accept except for extraordinary circumstances, you are stuck with those you accepted in Dec, which affects those who apply earlier. Maybe that bassoonist who looked so great in the fall isn’t so incredible next to the 4 other bassoonists who applied RD, but you only need one, and he’s already accepted. Unless a concerted effort is made to keep the EA numbers down, it is just easier to accept these incredible kids than to turn them down. During RD, there is no choice as you are stuck with the number of spaces left and those you alredayd accepted.</p>
<p>EA is a boon to colleges, though not binding and not as reliable as ED. Kids who get into a school they like EA, just might decide they do not want to continue the process and stick with the bird in hand. Parents too might be just done with the process. Also kids whose midyear grades are not so hot, may decide to stick with the EAs and get those final grades up not to lose their spots, but realize that their chances with those declining grades is not good at RD schools that use those numbers. </p>
<p>I know my son fell in love with his EA school. It really cooled his ardor for the process. He also liked his other early schools enough that he felt he had enough choices. Had we not had the apps ready to go, he would not have bothered with the RD options, and in retrospect, we probably should have bagged a number of them as he really was set to go. I know my good friend’s daughter only applied to high reaches RD as she was accepted EA to a pretty danged good school, and did not feel it worth her while to apply to anything that was its peer or below. She did not get into those reaches, so she is going to the EA school. Had she not done EA with that school, she would have added some safeties or like schools RD, and possibly found something to compete with that choice, especially if they came up with merit money or something else eyecatching.
I think EA is fine for most schools, but schools like Harvard have the problem that too many of their spots are filled EA, leaving fewer spots for kids who are of backgrounds that just do not get their acts together early. If they want to keep the EA program, they should probably keep their EA accept % the same as RD. I believe GT and MIT do that. That way only the very top kids will be accepted EA, the rest deferred. That still gives them an extra round to add to their folders for a re appraisal for RD, and the school to get a second look at them in light of the other applicants.</p>
<p>I think that we should not worry about Harvard. It is interesting to see if they can continue to do this for several years and not losing the cross-admits. So far we have not heard anything positive from Harvard other than uncertainty in everything. They just offered a z-list offer to a super kid who is heading to MIT. What a joke. With no EA, 7% acceptance rate, 74% yield, more than 200 drew from waitlist, I would worry to continue if I were them. Who wants to apply? what is the chance you get in?</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Quite a few evidently - over 27,000 this year. More than ever applied when they had EA.</p>
<p>Regarding 217, didn’t Harvard also change their financial aid policy this year?</p>
<p>So was eliminating EA a success for Harvard? They did get more apps than ever? DId yield go up? Did they achieve their purpose of getting more apps from disadvantaged groups that they felt EA discriminated against? I would be interested.</p>
<p>^ You will never find that out because they can easily redifine “disadvantaged” to say EA achieved the purpose.</p>