Unfortunately I don’t think anybody will know by September 2 whether everything is settled.
It is a little like Lando in The Empire Strikes back knowing whether or not he has a settlement with Darth Vader. Lando thought he had a deal, but then Darth Vader said “I’ve altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it further.” That’s not far from the situation here.
Re students with need versus others, I would be wary of reports on the internet of students without need being admitted off the waitlist. Some may be true but some are clearly false.
These are unprecedented times and everybody is doing the best they can.
I don’t see a need to lie about that tbh. Given the (already quite a few) data points so far, it seems mostly likely that all/most waitlist admits are full pay for this year. It actually makes sense for Harvard to do so given the budget situation.
People lie just to lie. Last time it was someone saying a wave was going to happen on the week of june 17. Didn’t happen.
Again it is likely due to the fact those who are full pay are simply just rich. Being rich gives you an edge on everyone else in terms of your academics and accomplishments.
I think what makes sense is that Harvard will need to give the international students a deadline date of sometime in late August: “If we can’t resolve this with the US government by August 15th and/or we can’t get you a Visa by that date, you will be auto-deferred to next year.”
Then they’ll have a week or two to replace and onboard new kids if they determine it’s worth the hassle of replacing them.
What they can’t let happen is to keep the internationals just hanging in the balance until Sept 2nd, then 15th, then 30th, etc. It doesn’t make any sense to bring them into the US late for classes, etc.
I really hope they draw a line in the sand in time to take more students. It probably needs to be more like August 1st or 10th for this to happen. I don’t even have a student waitlisted for Harvard but my kid attended a boarding school and has several classmate friends on this list.
I think Harvard still has a large waitlist pool at this point. I haven’t seen many rejections posted online, and the past two waves have been small—both in terms of acceptances and rejections.
They won’t know for sure if they can enter the country until they physically arrive at the airport, which will be sometime between August 18 and 26, depending on their pre-orientation program.
What kind of risk do you predict? Do you mean they might take the risk of overenrollment and let more waitlisted students in? Or do you mean they will take the risk that they can get all the foreign student issues worked out on time, thereby letting the waitlist students go.
Then why didn’t they get accepted right off the bat?
The waitlist is for similarly qualified candidates. This means means that even with the advantage given by their wealth, rich students only managed to land on the waitlist, not gain acceptance.
Unless you’re claiming that wealthy candidates on the waitlist are more qualified than their poor counterparts to the point that waitlist acceptances have purely been full-pay students, I think it’s fair to conclude that so-called “need-blind” Harvard is actually need-aware.
They don’t really need to know whether the students actually checked the full pay box in their applications. During the REA and RD rounds, kids who stated economic, family or racial adversaries likely received huge boosts for admissions. HARVARD just needs to stop using those factors for the waitlist consideration.
I’ll agree that wealthy candidates have an easier time landing on the waitlist compared to poor students. After that, they’re in a pool of essentially equally qualified students. Their “power up” has already been used.
With that said, the only way we could see the currently observed trend of only full-pay students being admitted is:
There are significantly more wealthy candidates on the waitlist to the point where all waitlist admits so far have been full-pay, based on pure chance. I think this is unrealistic.
Wealthy candidates have been able to send in more impressive LOCIs because of opportunities granted by their wealth. I agree with this to an extent, but don’t think that this can realistically be enough of a factor to support a “need-blind” Harvard purely admitting full-pay students from the waitlist.
It really does look like Harvard is taking mostly full-pay students off this year’s wait-list. Thirty students paying about $90 k a year adds up to roughly $11 million over four years—hard for any school to ignore, big endowment or not.
August 1 feels like the absolute cutoff; once orientation starts on 8/15, switching schools is basically off the table.
From what I’ve seen, your best shot at getting off the wait-list is if:
You can pay full price.
You’ve already committed (and are full-pay) at another top-five school.
Those on the waitlist are definitely qualified. Those coming off the list are there to fill an institutional need. Could be many wealthy students didn’t accept admission due to the fact that their state school or another ivy is offering better aid.
Yes this can be enough of a factor. Getting last minute internships or awards is only one who has the wealth can really do.
Those who have suffered hardships based on their situation either economic or racial will be judged based on their circumstances.
For example test scores.
You can have a wealthy student who scores 1550, while their school average is 1470.
You can have a economically disadvantaged student who scores a 1400 while their school is a Title I school with an average of 880.
These kids didn’t have huge advantage. In fact, the wealthier student had it easier. They were able to have a great foundation in math and reading, and were able to get subsequent test prep (I was that kid going to a private school receiving this).
This is just one aspect (being standardized tests). There are many other aspects that need to be considered also. Economically disadvantaged students do not receive a boost. If at all, they are expected to do well in a system most fail in.