<p>I just think this whole “revealed preferences” thing is a bunch of hooey. It doesn’t tell you about the preferences of students generally, only about the preferences of students who are cross-admits to two schools. And that’s going to be a skewed sample. Where does it account for the “revealed preferences” of students like my D1, who applied to her first choice school ED, was accepted, and never looked back? She doesn’t end up in any cross-admit pools because she only applied to one school, her top choice; you can’t have a much stronger “revealed preference” than that, but she’s excluded from the population being studied. At some highly selective schools ED admits make up nearly half the entering class, but they’re completely ignored in any study that looks only at cross-admit data. In fact, at any school that has binding ED, you’re going to exclude from the study the very people who had that school as their #1 choice, those who applied ED; the people who end up in the study are almost by definition people who didn’t have that school as their #1 choice, because if they had, they’d have applied ED. (Of course, the RD round admits will always include some people who were deferred in the ED round, but most are not in that category).</p>
<p>Sure, these cross-admit studies always show Harvard as the most-preferred, but so what? In part, that’s because most of the people who apply to Harvard have it as their #1 choice already, and they apply to a bunch of other schools as back-ups since they can’t be certain they’ll get into Harvard. That’s, what, 35,000 people a year? Sure, most of them would choose Harvard if that have that choice. But there are another 3 million who don’t apply to Harvard; no doubt some of those (1 million or so?) would love to go to Harvard if they thought they could get in, but they don’t bother to apply because they have no realistic chance. But another very large number (the remaining 2 million?) have no interest in Harvard even if they thought they had a chance at admission. What about their “revealed preferences”? They just voted with their feet, or rather with their applications, and rejected Harvard. My D1 was certainly in that category. I’m not saying she’d have been admitted to Harvard, but she certainly would have been a plausible candidate, with credentials as strong as most who apply and many who are admitted. But she had no interest in Harvard or any other Ivy except Brown, which she didn’t like as well as her ED LAC, the only school she actually applied to.</p>
<p>In the end, all the cross-admit data can tell us is the preferences of cross-admits, and if you do those comparisons–surprise! surprise!–it almost invariably comes out that the school with the lower admit rate wins. Why might that be? Hmmm, maybe it’s because applicants aren’t stupid. In general they’ll apply to their #1 choice school, and then to a bunch of slightly to substantially less selective schools as back-ups, fall-backs, or outright safeties. If they get into their #1 choice, it’s a no-brainer where they’ll enroll. But very few people are dumb enough to apply to Harvard as a back-up in the event they don’t get into a less-selective first choice. Someone whose first choice is Harvard might well apply to Tufts as a back-up. Someone whose first choice is Tufts is highly unlikely to apply to Harvard as a back-up. So the cross-admit pool between those two schools is going to be heavily skewed toward those whose first choice was Harvard, because those whose first choice was Tufts will be screened out of the sample at the application stage.</p>