princeton vs. yale

Byerly
Sat, 29 Apr 2006 18:05:57 +0000

What would be “best” and what will be likely to happen are different things.

What will supplant ED and EA, IMHO, will not be a principled agreement on the April 1 notification date but just the opposite: a disorderly decline into chaos with some form of “rolling admissions” everywhere.

Just as the NBA is signing high school freshmen, the colleges will be going after hot recruits earlier and earlier.

The battle for top URMs, academic superstars, the limited number competent students in the lowest economic quadrant, and those representing “diversity” of every stripe will soon make the recruiting of athletes look like a virtuous excercise by comparison.

As it is, the “likely letter” (a Princeton invention, by the way) has gone far beyond ED and EA in making the April 1 admissions date a dead letter. It is honored in the breach, at the Ivies and elsewhere.

Both Princeton and Yale admit they send 'em in droves now, and not just to jocks. Dartmouth sent out * six hundred * of them … enough, together with the ED admits, to fill their entire freshman class!

At Yale, when you add the “likely” recipients to the SCEA admits and the SCEA applicants deferred and admitted later, you account for virtually the entire class. Princeton is more secretive with its numbers, but the same may be true there as well. This is the way things are going, generally.

Even Stanford - formerly content to rely on geography to do their heavy recruiting of non-jocks, sent out nearly 200 “likelies” this year - split between “academic superstars” and “top URMs.”