<p>My friends and I were recently discussing the impending impossibility of admission to Stanford early this year:</p>
<p>1) Switched to common app = increased applicant pool.
2) 2008 = largest class of high school Seniors thus far.
3) End of H, P, UVA Early programs = inundation of Stanford early program with tons of qualified students who otherwise may not have even applied.</p>
<p>So, it seems S will be able to hand pick the best of the best for its class of 2012 (even more so than usual), and reject the rest.</p>
<p>BUT</p>
<p>1) How many students will get into S and say “forget H/P, I’m sticking with S.”?
2) How many students will get into S and then apply regular to and get into H/P and choose H/P over S?
3) How high/low/generally effed up are yields likely to be at S/H/P?</p>
<p>MOREOVER:</p>
<p>All the kids who would have normally applied and gotten into S early but this year get rejected, plus all the kids who will apply regular to H/P when they would have applied early last year (who no longer have the luxury of applying to only one school) will all be applying to other schools like Northwestern, Amherst, Williams, the like. Won’t it then be very hard to get into these schools as well?</p>
<p>admissions is selective, it is crazy and makes no sense. these are numbers that we will not know until evyerthing is said and done. i promised myself I would not go crazy trying to figure it out,
but i understand the desire to try.</p>
<p>Very astute observations – I hadn’t thought of those. This year will probably be the year that Stanford has a 9% acceptance rate, like Harvard and Yale.</p>
<p>yes, you are absolutely correct that all the historical admissions yield curves for the top 20 or so schools are going to be completely messed up this year. The admissions offices are aware of it - Yale told us, when we visited, that they have ‘no idea’ exactly how they will handle early admissions this year, given they are in a similar position to Stanford, with tons of applicant overlap with Harvard and Princeton.</p>
<p>And while the ED schools will not have an early problem, as you point out they will all have an RD problem, including Stanford and Yale, because the 800 people who normally get admitted to Harvard early, and the 600 or so people who used to be ED at Princeton, are still out there, with multiple apps out. </p>
<p>So it’s a mess all round, and I am guessing a lot more use of the waitlist this year, since the usually reliable yield curves are going to be useless this year at the top schools, but residential colleges can’t risk admitting too many students.</p>