Question about EA deferreds

Byerly
Fri, 25 Mar 2005 02:23:41 +0000

All four (HYPS) used their waitlists for the Class of 2008 to a lesser or greater degree.

Increasingly, the technique at most elites is to “go light” on regular admissions while planning to fill in if necessary from the WL. This allows schools to cherry-pick the WL to fill specific needs (more URMs, a tuba player, a potential French major, a resident of South Dakota) while keeping the admit rate as low as possible and the yield rate as high as possible.

Consider: if the normal RD yield for a school is 50%, it will have to admit 200 people to fill 100 slots. If it intentionally under-admits by 100 in the RD round, it will be able to fill the empty slots with a juicy 100% yield rate from the WL, needing to admit only 100 people for those 100 slots.