EA stats now--Caltech

Parents Forum
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<p>I just thought some of you might find this interesting. These excerpts come from the Feb 14 issue of The California Tech, the school newspaper.

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<p>To me, it seems this EA format primarily benefits the admitted early action candidates more than the school, and certainly more than the RA candidates. A pool of 2750 RA with potentially as few as 61 openings? (Of course I know there are some EA who turn down a spot, but still–wow!)</p>

<p>This is why I mentioned in another thread that I was annoyed by my son’s refusal to make up his mind between Caltech & UChicago (both EA admits). As it happened, a number of S’s classmates did the same thing and Caltech wound up with a freshman class of 240 and were scrambling to get housing for them all.</p>

<p>It seems to me that this EA method also gives an incentive to apply EA to all the schools of interest that allow it, which will in turn result in lower yields and more uncertainty for the schools. I’m just not sure I think the benefits outweigh the disadvantages, now that I look at it again. Any thoughts?</p>

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<p>My S and several other classmates were admitted SCEA to Harvard. My S accepted right away. One classmate is waiting for other offers. I know that Harvard is her top choice but she needs to compare financial offers. I would never dream of suggesting to her that she withdraw her other apps.
I also don’t believe in pressuring a student into making up his or her mind early. S#2 knew that Harvard was his first choice (after spending early fall comparing different colleges). S#1 applied RD to several schools (could not think of an absolute first choice) and dithered until April 30 before he could settle for one among those that accepted him. Both ways are fine with me.
Caltech and MIT are possibly suffering from the downturn in engineering jobs as much as from the EA/SCEA/ED/RD issue.</p>

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<p>The schools made the rules and they are aware that most will wait to see their other offers. Marite’s son is probably rare in having already let them know. The rules allow for, and assume, many kids won’t make up their mind until the last minute. That’s what wait lists are for.</p>

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<p>wyogal:</p>

<p>in a group session, one Dean of Admin said that he much, much preferred kids apply EA to his school and not ED. He noted that kids do change their minds, after seeing other schools and offers. But, he mentioned two benefits for the school: 1) spreads out thier application processing over five months, i.e., easier on staff; 2) allows the school a couple of months to continue to sell itself to EA acceptees. He commented that kids obviously get into other schools, and it was his job to sell his school to those EA kids.</p>

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<p>Wyogal ~ I’ve seen your comments in a couple of threads about the need for kids to accept or decline an early admission because the college is “holding a spot for each kid.” I don’t understand your point.</p>

<p>We visited CIT last year and were told that CIT accepts 500 kids every year, in order to yield their target of 215-220 enrolled freshmen. So far, so good. So when you read that 154 have been admitted early, this means (IMHO) that 346 more will be admitted in the RD round. Out of the 500 (154 early and 346 regular) CIT hopes to get 220 freshamn. There is no “seat” being “held” for any of these admitted students, and if some of the 154 early admits were to decline immediately, I doubt that the number of regular admits (346) would be increased. </p>

<p>CIT’s plan is a statistical plan, and whether the early admits accept or decline at once, or at the last minute, or in between, has no impact on how many regular round students get admitted (346 in this example). No seats are being held, but rather 500 students are being admitted, period. Some years (as you noted) they yield 240 out of 500. Some years they get 207. But they aim for an average of about 220.</p>

<p>Maybe I am missing some key point in your argument (it won’t be the first time), but right now, I’m with Marite: wait until the last minute to accept. No one else is harmed by letting the EA students decide at the last minute.</p>

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<p>First, to all of you let me say I used to agree with your sentiments before I went through it, and at the same time, if my second son wants to apply to multiple EA schools, I am not going to prohibit this. However,</p>

<p>Marite, I don’t think SCEA or ED is quite the same, because no student is having multiple early acceptances under those conditions.</p>

<p>reasonableDad, In the first place it’s Caltech, not CIT. And no, they are not equivalent, which makes me wonder if you were really there. Maybe you just missed that part :); it was a long trip.
Second, every school’s admissions plan is statistical if it is not year round rolling admissions.<br>
Third, of course the acceptances of EA spots changes how many RA offers go out-- all you have to do to understand this is examine the extremes. If all EA spots were declined early on, they would issue more RA acceptances, and of course if they were all accepted early on, they would be extremely foolish to offer as many RA spots as they regularly do.
Fourth, there definitely are seats being held for EA acceptances-- my son had until 4 weeks after the RA offer date to accept. What is that if not being held? If they were not being held, the school would never go over its quota because when they reached it, they would just say “sorry, too late.”</p>

<p>zagat, as far as “that’s what wait lists are for,” having been on one myself for graduate school many (too many) years ago, every day was a roller coaster ride of not knowing where I would be going. I understand that today’s world is much more dog-eat-dog, but to whom much is given, much is expected {“And from everyone who has been given much shall much be required; and to whom they entrust much, of him they will ask all the more” (Luke 12:47-48).} No I’m not religious at all, but if we cannot understand how keeping a wealth of opportunities to oneself may adversely impact others, I don’t see how one can demand empathy in return.</p>

<p>Just so we can all lighten up here, I want to tell you when my son actually did make the decision. It was the day after the headmaster (small private boys school on east coast) had him stand up in chapel to announce to the entire upper school that he had never, in 25+ years, had a student accepted to Caltech. Evan knew then that he had to make a decision soon, or it would be a foregone conclusion anyway.</p>

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<p>Wyogal ~ I’m interested that you insist on CalTech rather than CIT (California Institute of Technology, the formal name of the institution). That’s what we always called it when I was a boy in SoCal, but now many on this board and elsewhere use CIT because it is shorter and easier to type, and because it resonates with the main alternative, MIT. I have indeed been to CIT, or CalTech if you prefer, many, many times over the last 30 years. Some of my closest friends attended there, and I have indeed returned to see if this is an alternative that will suit my S and D.</p>

<p>Again, though, I don’t see the logic of your argument. You state that all school’s admissions programs are statistical. Quite true. Then you leap forward and suggest that this means your conclusion about “held seats” is also true. Not so fast, please. Look at my previous post again. I am explicitly stating why a statistical admission policy means that no specific seat is held is held for a specific applicant, and no one else is harmed by waiting to reply. I link my argument to the variation in results (207 vs 240). If your leap of faith in thinking that specific seats are help were true, then two things would follow:

  1. There would never be an enrollment under 215, because CalTech would simply keep adding available seats to the regular enrollment levels to fill the class.
  2. There would never be an enrollment over 220, because CalTech would know that they were going to statistically target about 200 students from the two enrollments, and the fine tune the final number by adding a few more “seats” to the RD round and taking more enrollees from the wait list.</p>

<p>Neither of these things is true, using the information from your own previous emails.</p>

<p>Also, you are not considering the timing of events, as far as I can see. EA letters go arrive in late December or January, do they not? But the RD decisions at CalTech have in fact been completed now, in late February (letters are not out, but decisions are made). So for CalTech to be using information from the EA round to alter the number of RD acceptances they would have to have received the EA information about ten days ago at the latest. If CalTech was going to use such information to select the RD number, then they would solicit the information by moving back the decision dates, or asking for a statement of intent, or simply by having an ED program in place. CalTech does none of these things.</p>

<p>CalTech does none of these things because they don’t need to do them, because they don’t use the limited number of EA decisions that they receive before February 15 to control admissions in the RD round. They have an overall plan, and the adjustments (admission from the waitlist, etc) are made at the end of the RD round, not in mid-February.</p>

<p>If you want to argue that whenever an EA or RD kid turns down CalTech, it makes it possible for one more waitlist kid to attend CalTech, then possibly you have an argument. But even this argument is not necessarily so. To argue, as you seem to be arguing, that saying “no” to an EA offer adds one seat in the RD round, and saying “yes” to an EA offer subtracts one seat from the RD round is simply not correct. Neither of us (I think) knows whether the distribution of early responders to the EA offers is skewed more positive than the EA total, but it seems likely to me. In any event, it is very, very unlikely that there is any kind of one-for-one response of the type you envision as a “seat being held.”</p>

<p>While I agree that if all EA acceptances were rejected before February 15th, CalTech might increase the number of RD acceptances being made, this is an extreme example which would result from a completely different mechanism. CalTech statistically predicts what fraction of the EA acceptees will eventually enroll, and the number is significant. If all of them declined, it would indicate some huge externality in that particular year, making it different han all other years, and the admission office would need to react to this in the RD round.</p>

<p>By the way, CalTech publishes results indicating that they know that EA acceptees are stongly influenced to enroll by whether they attend the PreFrosh Weekend, and by how successful the Weekend event is. Therefore we (and they at CalTech) know that by the middle of February there is no good way to correlate the intentions of the EA acceptees with eventual enrollment. So there is really no reliable way to correlate specific seats offerred EA with the number of seats offerred RD.</p>

<p>But no specific seats are being held for specific kids. Therefore, applicants should take their time to decide, and let their universities worry about filling all of the seats, and not letting too many freshmen enroll. This is the admissions committee’s responsibility, not the responsibility of the applicants as individuals.</p>

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<p>Reasonabledad:
About CIT vs. Caltech. CIT is shorter to type, but Caltech is shorter to say. We’ve always used Caltech. CIT is likely to elicit “huh?” But no one has suggested MassTech instead of MIT. :)</p>

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<p>Wyogal, your son made the decision to attend Caltech because his Headmaster announced his acceptance? I expect my kids to use all of the time that their acceptances allow them, and not feel pressurized by external factors.</p>

<p>(1) The schools that have had EA for many years, know that it works for them, if it did not, all they had to do was have only RD. EA is also a gaming strategy for some schools.</p>

<p>(2) I say more power to the students who have put in the time and effort to send in outstanding applications to EA schools by Nov.15. They hear back early, and have more time to visit the schools.</p>

<p>EA = Early Action on the part of the schools, and not on the part of the students:)</p>

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<p>I agree. My son applied to both Harvard and MIT EA several years ago when the EA programs at these schools were not Single Choice. He had not decided on his first choice college, but realized that the ED program would give him a statistical advantage for being accepted at Harvard (for MIT, I don’t even think there is a statistical advantage between EA and RD), and he felt that his credentials were complete and didn’t need to be strengthened by scores or grades from the first part of his senior year. He was accepted to Harvard and deferred at MIT (later accepted RD), but ended up choosing Stanford (where he applied RD - at that time Stanford had a binding ED program). If the EA program is not single choice, there should be no pressure on the student to accept the offer. I agree totally with chocoholic’s comments above.</p>

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<p>I give up.</p>

<p>Marite, thank you for backing up the use of “Caltech.” That’s what they want to be called, and that’s what they have traditionally been called. That’s why the coffee shop is named “The little t” – it’s not CalTech; it’s Caltech. There is no shirt, no notebook, no car window decal, no bumper sticker, no binder, etc., etc. that EVER says CIT, or CalTech. Period. End of conversation. I suppose that in concerneddad’s opinion it would be acceptable to refer to matech, or MassTech. Ridiculous.</p>

<p>Chocoholic, it wasn’t BECAUSE the headmaster announced it, it was WHEN the headmaster announced it. That’s what I’m talking about. He knew he could choose UCh, but if he put it off much longer there would be an explanation to be given.</p>

<p>MotherOfTwo, I find it amazing that on another thread the parents can chastise a student for even applying to a school EA when they aren’t really that interested, and here a mother is equally berated for asking her son to make a decision after 8 weeks when there is no more outside information to be had. Huh? What gives? Pretty much a double standard, I’d say.</p>

<p>concerneddad, I repeat: I give up. If you are going to be so deliberately obtuse, so be it. As for your suppositions about the timing and motives of the Caltech admissions committee, you have no better idea than anyone else, it’s just a guess on your part (unless you’d like to come clean and identify yourself as a member of that committee?)</p>

<p>To all of you-- what is the matter with reminding a 17 year old that there are other people out there who don’t have as many choices, and colleges that are waiting for an answer? What is the matter with wondering what a school like Caltech gets from such a system?</p>

<p>I can tell, CC isn’t the place for me. I just posted the article because I thought some people would be interested in the stats, but you are all so hardwired in to your preconceived ideas about how things work you can’t take it for what it’s worth. Bye and good luck. :)</p>

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<p>I guess you aren’t coming back, which is a shame.
I thought your perspective was interesting, and though I disagreed with you, I thought the discussions you provoked were pretty good.</p>

<p>For what it’s worth, I don’t think it is a double standard to chastise someone for applying EA somewhere where they don’t want to go, but not to care when they make their decision once accepted. By applying somewhere that you don’t want to go, you waste time and money. You obviously waste your own time filling out the application. You waste your teacher’s and GC’s time by having them write and mail more recommendations. You waste your parents money - and application fees aren’t cheap. You waste the time of the secretaries, and admissions committee at the college that you don’t want to go to. And most of these people get paid for their wasted time - leading to less resources for education at both the high school and the college. So this is wrong.
On waiting to decide, I totally agree with everything concerneddad said, and didn’t really find him obtuse.</p>

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<p>First of all, on the Caltech vs. CIT issue: CIT is, in fact, an abbreviation used around the Caltech campus, albeit less frequently. A search on “Caltech CIT” turns up 36,000+ references, including many pages on Caltech’s website.</p>

<p>For example: atc.caltech.edu/CIT_Parking/home.htm is the link for “CIT Parking Home Page.”</p>

<p>And, interestingly, here is a link for a Caltech website featuring a large and prominent “CIT/MIT” logo to highlight a joint Caltech/MIT news conference in 2000, featuring the presidents of both institutions:
<a href=“http://pr.caltech.edu/events/mitcit/[/url]”>http://pr.caltech.edu/events/mitcit/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>And it’s also interesting to note that the student government association is “ASCIT,” which stands for “Associated Students of California Institute of Technology.”</p>

<p>So, Caltech DOES indeed use the CIT acronym. (By contrast, a google search suggests that MIT does NOT use MASStech or MAtech or anything along those lines. Those terms appeared to be trademarks for entirely unrelated corporated entities.)</p>

<p>On the central–and more serious–point of this thread, I would suggest that it is wyogal who is being obtuse. </p>

<p>Colleges that want an early clear and unambiguous commitment from their early applicants have the option of running an ED program.</p>

<p>Colleges that want to offer their early applicants the most possible time to make the most thoughtful and considered decision choose to offer EA rather than ED.</p>

<p>Caltech is a school where many students struggle and their retention and 4- year/6-year graduation rates are lower than many of their peer institutions. A number of their students apparently later regret the choice they made.</p>

<p>It is not a college to be entered without a great deal of thought and consideration. </p>

<p>Many students are, understandably, more hesitant, and will want more information before making a commitment to a school with such an intense, idiosyncratic, and demanding curriculum and culture. Caltech strongly urges students to attend prefrosh weekend in April to get a clear firsthand idea of the campus culture. They do not facilitate overnight visits before then.</p>

<p>*
To all of you-- what is the matter with reminding a 17 year old that there are other people out there who don’t have as many choices, and colleges that are waiting for an answer? *</p>

<p>In retrospect, it sounds like wyogal’s son was able to collect the information he needed to make a good decision about Caltech relatively quickly. It’s great that it worked out that way for him. </p>

<p>I’m not going to argue with her decision. With benefit of hindsight, it’s clearly worked out well for her son.</p>

<p>In contrast, I know another student who was admitted to both Caltech and Chicago EA last year but who needed time to visit those schools, as well as others that accepted her EA and RD, before reflecting and making a final decision. I do not think Caltech or Chicago would have been better off if she had rushed into making a premature decision.</p>

<p>* What is the matter with wondering what a school like Caltech gets from such a system? *</p>

<p>There’s nothing wrong with wondering what a school like Caltech gets from EA. </p>

<p>Reasonable people can wonder about such things and reach different conclusions.</p>

<p>The fact is, however, that nobody is holding a gun to Caltech’s head and forcing them to offer EA. They CHOOSE to offer it. They certainly have the option of ED or just RD or rolling admissions or other variants like ED1 and ED2 or “likely letters.”</p>

<p>My own speculation about why a college like Caltech offers EA:</p>

<p>(1) it gives them an opportunity to market themselves more thoroughly to a very strong subset of their applicant pool over a longer period</p>

<p>(2) it spreads out their admissions workload and allows them to take a more careful look at a small subset of their applicant pool. (The fall EA/ED season can be a good opportunity to train new members of the admissoins committee on a small subset of the overall workload. This is especially true at a place like Caltech which uses current students on the admissions committee, since they necessarily have a high turnover rate.)</p>

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<p>Addendum on the nomenclature issue:</p>

<p>Caltech even has a clever play on its CIT acronym in the form of (CIT)^2 (I can’t do superscripts here, unfortunately, but this ASCII workaround is meant to signify “CIT-squared”) , which is a reference to:</p>

<p>California Institute of Technology Center for Innovative Technology.</p>

<p><a href=“http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/336/articles/Volume%204/03-04-04/CIT2.html[/url]”>http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/336/articles/Volume%204/03-04-04/CIT2.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;