<p>Yes record yield. Looks like some posters have grossly mispredicted the effect this would have on admissions.</p>
<p>I am happy so many ‘elevens’ have decided to join us :D</p>
<p>^^^
Not knowing anything more than all colleges want to fill their dorms.</p>
<p>At this point, they probably know how many upperclass students plan to live on campus and discovered that some dorm rooms will be empty.</p>
<p>Yes of course they know how many plan to live on campus. At this point you have already had to confirm whether you are living on campus next year.</p>
<p>I don’t see what wanting to fill your dorm has with yield. The students make the choice to attend (yield), not the university. The university can only predict it.</p>
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<p>I sure hope they discovered some empty dorm rooms… at least 1050 of them.</p>
<p>Xiggi - I guess you do righteous anger better than irony:</p>
<p>“Is it ironic that a school that has espoused very decent practices of open diversity has seen the number of what you call WASP diminishing?”</p>
<p>“Very decent practice” - I guess that’s a matter of opinion. Segregation was once thought to be a very decent practice.</p>
<p>“Open diversity” - What is that? As mentioned in this thread, for a supposedly “open” place MIT has not for example done what U. Mich. was forced to do in its lawsuit, which was to reveal admit rates by race for various SAT/GPA combos: at U. Mich. certain grid positions that had an 8% white admit rate had a 100% black admit rate (keep in mind that U. Mich. overall admit rate is much greater than 8%). Wouldn’t it be nice to tell certain kids that if you are white or Asian you are wasting your money applying if you have certain SAT/grade combos - you;d have better luck if you spent your application fee on lottery tickets? </p>
<p>“Seen the # diminishing” - of course you’d expect the # of WASPs to diminish over time as they form an ever smaller % of the US population (and esp. of the population that is interested in attending a technical school such as MIT). But I think that the diminution has been greater than their % of the population would indicate - I haven’t done the math but if you subtract out all the different groups I mentioned how many male WASPs are left at MIT? Will you support AA for WASPs if they become an “under-represented minority” at MIT?</p>
<p>Sorry 
to be constructive: </p>
<p>I hear about an initiative to bring more freshmen in- they are renovating a grad dorm and turning it into an undergrad dorm? Though I didn’t think they’d progressed so far as to actually increase the undergrad population yet. Anyone?</p>
<p>I think it’s very likely bad reporting on the part of The Tech.</p>
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<p>Oh no, I’d rather leave that to luminaries such as Roger Clegg and Linda Chavez. </p>
<p>I didn’t realize that you had so much interest in the protection of the various Northeastern endangered species. As far as supporting “under-represented minority,” I’d settle for a social and racial distribution that closely follow the population distribution of the United States, as opposed to the over representation of ingrates.</p>
<p>Pebbles:</p>
<p>The new undergrad dorm (formerly Asdown House) won’t be ready for another 2-3 years until the replacement grad dorm is ready. I am not sure how they plan to house 1070 freshmen, unless they squeeze some triples into doubles.</p>
<p>Cellardweller is right.</p>
<p>That increase won’t be coming for a couple years</p>
<p>From the MIT Reports to the President 2003–2004</p>
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<p>Could they need fewer XL beds?</p>
<p>Isn’t this the time period when MIT had overcrowding in the dorms? Why would they willingly go back to that enrollment number by possibly taking students off the wait list?</p>
<p>Because Marilee was off by ten percent (quite a high variance) regarding the yield for that year, the 1070 admits were very overcrowded in the dorms … and this is why MIT did not go to the waitlist for several years … Marilee kept underestimating the yield for a couple of years in a row.</p>
<p>It would be interesting to know (are there any published statements on this?) how soon after the beginning of April students admitted to multiple colleges announce where they will matriculate. The national reply date, by NACAC rules, is May 1st, but some students decide much sooner, and some announce their decisions before the national reply date. In other words, how many MIT cross-admits with other colleges were still in play when the fake resume news about Marilee Jones became public? </p>
<p>After edit: the revealed preferences study </p>
<p><a href=“http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/hoxby/papers/revealedprefranking.pdf[/url]”>http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/hoxby/papers/revealedprefranking.pdf</a> </p>
<p>reminds us that a college can boost yield by practicing “strategic admission,” that is by admitting students who were not admitted by any more appealing colleges. It’s hard to say when independent researchers will next have access to enough data to detect this pattern in the practice of a college admission office.</p>
<p>Certainly enough to have changed the yield should this have actually had any significant effect.</p>
<p>The fact is it didn’t and by next admission season, this will be very old news indeed.</p>
<p>The timing is not significant. Students have until May 1 to make up their minds. Should some have second thoughts, they can retract their acceptance of offer. Even if they have already mailed their decline cards (which most do not do right away and some never), they could retract these as well as long as they do so before May 1.</p>
<h2>“As Mollie points out, what makes school so interesting is being with people with all different strengths, interests, perspectives, and all different backgrounds.”</h2>
<p>I’m not going to comment on the AA issue because I see it as separate. </p>
<p>However, you do not need to select for different interests, strengths, and backgrounds in order for the class to have them. Do you think MIT students all were exactly alike 10 years ago? We had people to fill out the orchestra, band, and all the different sports without consciously looking for them. The only sameness was an extremely high degree of ability as students. If you think about (realized) talent and ability as a vector, MIT would find the magnitude and admit the highest 1000. It didn’t matter if you spent your time building an award-winning robot or made the U.S. Chemistry Olympic Team. They didn’t look to fill niches, but we got a variety of talents anyway. The point was to look for depth of thought in general. I think it’s a misconception to say that the individual who will be successful at engineering, science, and math have different profiles, especially at the age of 18. The whole tinkering ability is pretty rare, and mainly is only relevant for mechanical engineering majors. I would only recommend bending the rules slightly for some of these people, and only after they actually showed they were good at it (i.e., a rec rather than an essay saying that they build engines for fun–anyone can <em>say</em> they do this.)</p>
<p>The job of an ivy league admissions committee is much harder than for MIT. MIT is supposed to be selecting the people they think are the best bet to be leaders in technical fields. At the bottom of the admit pool, maybe you are splitting hairs between the bottom admits and the top rejects. However, if you are looking at two people who plan to be bio majors, if person A has 5 times the average in bio class as person B plus better grades, recs, and academic competition performance (from the same high school,) then person A gets admitted. This is not a given at the ivies.</p>
<p>To the person who said I was “ignorant” about the process, I think I know enough just from observation of who gets in and who doesn’t. There were over 70 national merit finalists in my high school graduating class and 20-25 of those went to ivies or MIT/CalTech (so basically everyone in the graduating class was “qualified” under soozievt’s definiton). Of the eleven people who won the National Merit Scholarship (given to the top 2000 finalists by the National Merit Foundation,) only two got into Harvard, Princeton, or Stanford. We had plenty of other people get in–they just weren’t the smartest or even the most talented in general. The typical admit at HYPS seems to be the national merit finalist who is a “community leader” and who juggles lots of different ECs at a shallow level. I have no problem with ivies looking for other things other than intelligence–I just think there is very little quality control when looking for the other things. It is so easy to game the system. If you’re in a rock band, great, it doesn’t matter if you suck; it’s still better than being a boring all-state violinist with perfect test scores. It’s almost a cliche’ to see someone do community service in a third world country. It doesn’t mean that person will be doing community service in a 3rd world country once they get that ivy league degree. (Northstarmom, a Harvard interviewer, likes to call it “so-called community service in Africa.”) Or starting a club and making yourself the president. That’s why I don’t have a problem with recruited athletes–at least they had to actually demonstrate a talent for <em>something</em>.</p>
<p>Good point, Marite, students can still have second thoughts about a decision previously expressed. And I recall you have a personal story about a student who was offered admission after withdrawing his regular round application, right?</p>
<p>^^that’s right!</p>
<p>Good comment, college alum. I don’t think people realize how subject to gaming (and just plain lying - see Marilee) the whole resume building process is. The URMs are taken care of, the rich suburban kids who are savvy on how to build their credentials up and have the money to take trips to Africa are taken care of, the only ones left in the lurch are the kids who “only” have fantastic grades and scores and are not savvy enough to game the system, hire college counsellors, etc. </p>
<p>One of the reasons why the SAT was created in the first place was to create a level playing field where a kid from some unknown rural school in Iowa could be compared to a prep school kid using some kind of objective and consistent measuring stick.</p>
<p>Oh, and by the way, I wasn’t suggesting a mechanism one way or the other about how news about Marilee Jones would affect yield at MIT. It could just as well be the case that a student deciding at the last minute could say, “Well, I guess I will go to MIT now that I know she is no longer on board” as it could be that a student would say, “Any college that doesn’t even check the resumes of its admission staff is no college that I want to go to.” I expect the new, improved, post-Jones MIT will be more appealing than ever–worldwide demographic and economic trends alone make that likely. </p>
<p>I’m sorry to hear that there is no let-up in the busyness of the MIT admission officers, but I’m sure they’ll do a good job of moving forward and adapting to the newly revealed realities.</p>