<p>Princeton President Shirley M. Tilghman said, “in eliminating our early program four years ago, we hoped other colleges and universities would do the same and they haven’t. One consequence is that some students who really want to make their college decision as early as possible in their senior year apply to other schools early, even if their first choice is Princeton.”</p>
<p>Face it, Princeton and Harvard thought that the other ivy leagues were going to follow their lead, but they didn’t. This resulted in schools like Yale and Stanford having time to “woo” their possible future students. I can definitely see now that getting accepted by Yale early action resulted in my love for Yale now. I used to be set on Princeton! But once I got that early acceptance from Yale, phone calls from current students, nice letters, friendly e-mails, a t-shirt, etc, I looked more at Yale and realized that it was the right place for me!</p>
<p>Does anyone have a guess as to how much Yale’s SCEA admit percentage will go up? I was thinking only 1-2%, but if Harvard’s admit with EA was 21.4% before… maybe Yale’s will shoot up to that level?</p>
<p>I’m really hoping so - I’ll be applying next year :)</p>
<p>@trekker5211
Well, if many applicants are knowledgeable enough, (and you can bet they are), there’ll probably be a flood of applications to H admissions come November '11. I’m hoping not many though… I’m in the same boat as you are! :)</p>
<p>Percentages don’t mean much. The caliber of students who will get accepted to HYP will remain roughly the same, although the early pool to Yale and Princeton might be slightly less competitive than Harvard’s. Either way, the introduction of SCEA to Yale and Princeton doesn’t help prospective Harvard applicants.</p>
<p>If you’re not special enough to get accepted to HYP this year, you probably won’t next year. Simple as that.</p>
<p>True, but looking at what the EA situation for H was before 2007, the admit rate in EA was high 10% ~ low 20% range, compared to like 6% RD… That is a pretty significant difference. I’m not saying unqualified applicants will get in, but there are so many good applicants, so chances for the av H wanna-be are slightly higher as adcoms are more likely give the go-ahead.</p>
<p>Do you disagree? I’d like to hear your opinion, felixfelices. (the name gets addicting to say after a while ^^)</p>
<p>What do you guys think the acceptance rates for SCEA for Harvard and Princeton will be? What about Yale/Stanford/MIT/other prestigious colleges’ EA rates?</p>
<p>Look, numbers mean something… but when you are comparing EA and RD admit percentages, they mean close to nothing. Think about who applies EA to HYPS. This pool will be extremely competitive, so the quality of the 10 or 20 percent who get admitted is tremendous. Moreover, HYPS knows how many applicants they want to accept early, so if you aren’t the creme de la creme, you can say goodbye to your Harvard dreams early (Not you, specifically).</p>
<p>just wondering, can you REA to harvard * and * EA to a public school? i realize that it’s restricted, but i heard that some schools allow you to apply early action still to public schools</p>
<p>I don’t think Harvard has posted detailed rules for its new REA program yet.</p>
<p>Here’s what Yale allows, and I bet it will be what Harvard and Princeton allow, too, when they get around to it:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>You can apply to any “rolling admission” public college anywhere, as long as you are not required to accept or decline admission until May 1, regardless of when they accept you.</p></li>
<li><p>You can apply Early Action (but not Early Decision) to a public college in the state where you reside, but not in any other state.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>So, only Michiganders can apply to Michigan’s Early Action program, but anyone can apply to Pitt on its rolling admissions basis, even if it gives you an answer in September. The difference between rolling admissions and Early Action is that rolling admissions considers applications as they come in, but does not necessarily guarantee a response in any particular time frame, at least until the end of March. With rolling admission schools, there is no special early program; all applications are treated the same. With Early Action, you have to apply by a certain date, you are promised an answer (which may be deferral) by another certain date, and you have to elect to be considered on that basis. If you don’t CHOOSE early action, your application is not considered until February-March. Neither, however, is binding on the student, like Early Decision.</p>
<p>You need also to check on how the schools will view certain submission dates for scholarships. USC and Claremont McKenna will give you special scholarship consideration if you submit your application by December 1. However, according to Stanford’s admissions office, if you submit your application (even as an RD applicant) for scholarships or any special admit program whose date falls before Stanford’s SCEA notification date in mid December you will have violated your SCEA contract. I would guess few people know this or know if it is enforced. I know that, at least in the case of USC, USC is very alert to the Stanford cut-off and simply accepts scholarship applications filed with them on December 2, or December 3 – since the applicants have filed past the December 1 deadline, they are simply continuing on with their RD status and have not violated Stanford’s requirement. At the same time, USC thumbs its nose at Stanford and simply takes what it gets post December 1 and puts them into the scholarship pool without automatically rejecting those who missed that December 1 deadline. The point is: if USC wants you , it will consider you for the scholarship whether you meet the December 1 deadline or not and so you can still honor your Stanford SCEA contract while still applying to USC for the scholarship. Send it in at 12:01 AM on December 2, just to be safe, so it looks like a computer timing error or something!</p>
<p>Yes and no. I think it will greatly increase the chances of the highly qualified in a way that SCEA doesn’t now by spreading them around four schools (versus two). But the 1800/3.5 is probably still out of luck.</p>
<p>If you aren’t accepted EA, you can either be outright reject or deferred to RD, right? I hope I’m understanding that correctly… if so, does anyone happen to know if Harvard was more likely to reject everyone not accepted EA or simply defer them? (back then when they previously had EA, I mean). I think that would influence my decision to apply EA :/</p>
<p>^ I am very curious about that one too. I am thinking that rejecting many of the “average Ivy applicants” (if there is such a thing, perhaps just the non athletes, legacies and URMs, or the people with slightly below 2400 SAT scores) would be a little bit unfair, since I usually hear that they end up taking a significant portion of these students after comparing and thoroughly evaluating all of them together. So hopefully they would only defer them if not accept them, sine I have also heard that it may be advantageous for these applicants (like me) to apply SCEA because it shows “demonstrated interest”. But this could all be bull. </p>
<p>Let me put it this way. EA will have a couple of thousand applicants filling up half of the class of 2016. For RD, the remanining 30000 will be competing for even FEWER spots. There will be a much lower admission rate RD next year while a slightly higher EA rate. I think. Anything can happen</p>
<p>Back when Harvard had EA last time, they deferred almost everyone who wasn’t admitted. I don’t have any reason to believe they will change their habits this time around. Deferrees were accepted at the same rate as the rest of the RD pool, which was in the low single digits. I thought that the deferral rate was excessive and they ought to reject more EA applicants, but I expect they’ll operate the same way.</p>