If UChicago had gone from unrestricted EA to SCEA, their number of early apps would have gone down, I think, because more people would have been likely to apply if they weren’t restricted by SCEA from applying to most other places early. Unless UChicago wanted to have a really high admit rate for the early round (thereby risking RD apps cratering), they’d have to admit more RD, where the yield would naturally be lower. Meanwhile, SCEA wouldn’t reduce the number of kids who got in to UChicago early and were emboldened to try their luck in the RD round at HYPS. I don’t know where yield would end up.
On the other hand, Princeton would never go unrestricted EA while HYS retained SCEA, because it would be unilateral disarmament. Their yield would of course go down because they’d be giving up the means of determining if students preferred them to their clear peer group while getting nothing for it in return, because SCEA at HYS would prohibit a contemporaneous unrestricted EA app at P. If, however, all of HYPS went unrestricted EA, all their yields would fall - but I’ll bet UChicago’s would fall further, because far fewer people would apply ED there - most of the best would apply early to all of HYPS and hope to get one.
The question to ask, I think, is why UChicago didn’t go SCEA, rather than ED. I would argue that they didn’t because they knew that doing so wouldn’t be enough for them to compete effectively against HYPS. They had to be able to offer a meaningful admissions advantage to applying early in order to entice students who would otherwise be tempted to do SCEA at HYPS. The only way that it made sense for them to offer that advantage, because it would reduce overall apps and therefore perceived selectivity, was to offer it in exchange for binding the students who took the advantage to enroll, through ED.
I’ll be prepared to acknowledge that UChicago is in the HYPS club when they show an ability to compete at the same level using the same weapons. One way to prove that would be for all of HYPS to go to ED. If they did that, they could leave UChicago in the dust. But they won’t, for reasons that are more important than proving UChicago is meaningfully less preferred than they are.
That IMHO is the big weakness in this discussion. Different kids with different life goals will pick one school or the other for different reasons. That more kids may pick one school over others in higher numbers doesn’t really say much beyond the numbers themselves. Its interesting to me that many of the discussions here about HYPS (and other Ivies/top schools) carry with them an implicit notion that they and the students who apply/attend are monolithic entities/people. Despite all the diversity and holistic admissions processes. Though no doubt the discussion does serve as yet another chance for people who like to engage in this type of discussion to do so.
@uchicagoparent - I don’t doubt that some people choose UChicago over HYPS, or that there could be many reasons for doing so, since UChicago is one of the nation’s top universities.
Entirely agree, @saillakeerie - fit isn’t quantifiable, and, again, there are all sorts of reasons to prefer any of these schools to any of the others, depending on who you are. But the post that began the discussion was getting at whether there might be tools to determine the revealed preferences of all applicants as a group.
Actually, if the University of Chicago is doing what DeepBlue86 suggested in post #43, I would be glad of it. Namely:
“Last year, by all appearances, UChicago cherrypicked the vast majority of its class from kids who had committed to attend if admitted, and (again by all appearances) waitlisted many of the other really desirable candidates so that they could then commit and be offered if they were otherwise left out in the cold and UChicago had spots for them. This was unique among peer schools in its scope, as far as I can tell.”
I have been advocating for something like “Later-Round Acceptances” where top schools hold a fraction of their slots open (maybe 3% to 5%, maybe even fewer), so that they could admit students they would like to have, but whom they left on the Admissions Committee table earlier on. Almost every year, there are distraught posts from a few truly outstanding students who did not get into any of their top choices. I think that in some cases, the Admissions Committees are thinking “very fine student, not an unusual category, someplace great will accept the person.” But when they all think that, the person can wind up with an outcome that I consider to be less than fair. Yes, they could be happy to “bloom where they are planted, etc., etc., etc.,” and lots of state flagships range from very good to outstanding; but if Chicago offered them spots, they might leap at them.
Maybe a CC thread should be created, asking students that matriculated at any of HYPSM if they were cross admits at any of HYPSM. The number of respondents will likely be small (but maybe not, because why wouldn’t they want to brag?), and the info will obviously be self-reported, but some of us nevertheless would be interested in seeing the results. These responses might be perceived as more reliable than Parchment. The CC community generally believes self-reported info on “chance me” threads and “admitted/rejected” student threads, right? Why not believe their self-reported info about being cross-admits too?
“The question to ask, I think, is why UChicago didn’t go SCEA, rather than ED.”
I agree – that is the question. To be fair, SCEA is such an odd duck that I’m not sure any new school (no matter how strong) could really ever get comfortable jumping into that pool.
Seems to me like UChi’s position was cleaner/stronger by just sticking with EA. They were doing it just like MIT does it. And getting results very close to YP, but without using the crutch of SCEA like YP do.
No matter how luminous UChi’s latest results turn out to be, folks (like you Blue) will just see it as obvious numbers gaming. Like how its done at some other aspiring schools (cough Penn cough; cough Duke cough).
That may be the case, but there’s certainly nothing unusual about it. There are still huge regional influences in where students apply and where they choose to attend, even at the most elite levels. The Ivies would enjoy a similar regional bias with more applicants from the Northeast opting to stay in the Northeast, both at the application stage and at the cross-admit stage. And since 27.1% of UChicago’s entering freshmen in 2014 (the latest year for which I can find data) came from the four states you mention, the fact that 35% of the Parchment responses came from those four states doesn’t seem wildly disproportionate. That’s probably roughly in line with the fractional share of UChicago’s applicant pool that comes form those four states.
That said, I’ve never placed much stock in cross-admit results, on Parchment or elsewhere. Yes, there are particular problems with the Parchment “data,” but I’m not persuaded that even more rigorous cross-admit studies tell us much. With relatively few exceptions, the more selective school usually “wins” the cross-admit battle. I think many (perhaps most) applicants have a clear favorite or “dream school”" at the time they apply, and they apply to a bunch of other schools of similar or lesser selectivity as back-ups in the event they aren’t admitted to their top choice. So an applicant whose first choice is Harvard might apply to Northwestern as a back-up, but a student whose first choice is Northwestern isn’t going to apply to Harvard as a back-up because she’ll figure “If I can’t get admitted to Northwestern I’m surely not going to be admitted to Harvard.” So the pool of Harvard-Northwestern cross-admits is skewed by inclusion of many applicants whose first choice was Harvard all along, while those whose first choice was Northwestern won’t be in that cross-admit pool because they won’t apply to Harvard in the first place. The fact that Harvard “wins” the cross-admit battle mostly tells us that Harvard is more selective, that’s all. (There are, of course, some exceptions, e.g., BYU which is the “dream school” for many Mormon kids who could get into more selective schools and sometimes apply to them). And regional preferences also probably play some role. But none of that tells us anything about which schools are “more desirable” in the abstract.
Indeed. I’ve often wondered, ‘what’s the point?’ I mean, why should a high school senior or parent care? That’s a serious question. If you have acceptances from Harvard and Yale, do you really care if say, H wins the “battle” 60% of the time (or vice versa)? If you are from the NE and have acceptance to Pton and Stanford, is the fact that Pton wins the cross-admit battle (if they do?) even a consideration?
Yup, and they also receive a full ride from BYU if they have great stats.
Probably true, since ‘most’ of the top schools are in the NE; in other words, all within a few hours’ drive of each other. But I would submit that regional preference is much more pronounced for cross admits between Stanford and HYP.
Mucho ado about nada. Why one picks a particular school over another can stem from all kinds of reasons: preferred weather, perceived “better” prestige, nicer looking buildings, proximity (or farther distance) to home, greater ice cream and pop tarts, better sports culture, higher USNWR ranking, better grade inflation, more generous financial aid package or, hopefully, better educational opportunities pertaining to one’s intended study. So what if school A gets greater % of cross-admits than school B. It just means A is more popular than B by that % for WHATEVER the reason and nothing more.
In the generally bogus realm of Parchment, this is how Harvard compares by cross-admits with a few liberal arts colleges (all have been coded as statistically significant):
Bowdoin 33% vs. Harvard 67%
Hamilton 28% vs. Harvard 72%
Wesleyan 28% vs. Harvard 72%
Middlebury 27% vs Harvard 73%
Pomona 26% vs Harvard 74%
Amherst 15% vs Harvard 85%
Williams 15% vs Harvard 85%
Having worked at (and attended) two of these universities, what would be interesting to me is how students feel after one year at their chosen university. I’ve known many students who realized after arriving that their “preferences” were misplaced. And the saddest thing was that they felt they couldn’t transfer as their parents/families/friends would never understand why the left. I really wish people would focus more on how enrolled students feel about their college choice than on analysis like this. Not to mention that we are talking about a vanishing small number of students who face this dilemma.
As an aside, I also find it weird that a cross-admit would prefer a college like Bowdoin over Harvard or vice versa. What were they thinking when they decided on colleges? The two colleges have little in common except academic excellence. I just toured Pomona and several other outstanding LACs this summer. I can see how students who love the small LAC experience would be attracted to them but cannot fathom how they could also say they really liked Harvard, Yale or Columbia. Indeed, Columbia and Harvard stressed that what they saw as their strongest point was that they were urban and weren’t a small LAC but rather fully integrated into major research universities. Indeed, when I was a freshman, the Freshman Dean actually said, “we don’t hand hold here so you need to find your way”.
I agree with the point above that Pomona or Bowdoin or whatever are very different than larger schools including HYPS. However, I think some high school students might not be sure whether they want the intimate experience or the big world experience. Or they might change their mind upon becoming college students.
On the Chicago question, I’ll personally never take a school that uses ED extensively as seriously as one that let’s their students compare. To me, the only reason to have ED instead of EA or SCEA is that the school figured they will lose in direct competition, and need ED to maintain yield.
Are you @exlibris97 suggesting that there’s some massive difference between, say, Wesleyan with 800 students per class and Yale with (before this year) 1,200 and its residential college system? There are some significant differences, sure, but it’s not at all irrational for a student who likes one to like the other almost as well.
One friend of my kids – who was an extremely sophisticate, thoughtful kid – applied to nine LACs and Yale, was admitted to all of them, and went to Yale. Another kid I know tangentially actually turned Harvard down for Wesleyan. Then she had buyer’s regret a few weeks later, and after pleading her case in person at the Harvard admissions department was allowed to change her mind in late May. (That case actually showed up, briefly, on CC.) Yet another kid had her final choice come down to three extremely different options: Carnegie-Mellon School of Computer Science, the University of Chicago, and Carleton. She wanted to study computer science. She chose Carleton. But she didn’t make a final choice among those different models of education until May of her senior year in high school, not October. And the outcome would have been difference had she been admitted to MIT or Princeton.
There’s an interesting twist on the Harvard-Wesleyan example above. A close high school academic rival/frenemy of the kid who almost went to Wesleyan DID go to Wesleyan, where she absolutely knocked the cover off of the ball academically and graduated as one of the top students in her class. When she applied to PhD programs in her field, she was essentially admitted to all of the top ones, and had to choose from a list that included Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and Berkeley. The woman who went to Harvard did fine, but nowhere near as well.
Finally, contrary to some assumptions others are making here: At my kids’ public school, almost 100% of kids in their cohort who were accepted someplace SCEA applied to other colleges RD – in one case, as many as 11 – in large part in order to compare financial aid offers. While most wound up attending their SCEA school, a few switched. Also, as noted above, my kids friends cross-admitted to Harvard and Stanford split 50-50 between them. Harvard is a LOT closer to us than Stanford.
In my high school kids regularly applied to S, but very few got in. Meanwhile Harvard accepted 2 or 3 year after year. The only two that S admitted in 6 years while I was looking at Naviance were two athletes - one in lacrosse, the other in football, both URMs and one with political connections.
My kid BTW was one of the many who got into H, was rejected by S. And also one of the few who turned down H for another school - he would have turned it down for MIT (but he wasn’t accepted there, he might have turned it down for Caltech, but wasn’t accepted there either). He ended up at Carnegie Mellon for computer science.
FWIW my younger son like U of Chicago better than any of the Ivies.
@oldschooldad I wonder if the reason for the weirdly low scores is the 0s for nonsubmitted. Instead of just having blank space after, say, ACT, there is a 0. Maybe that’s bringing averages down? Seems easy to fix though. Odd.
“I also find it weird that a cross-admit would prefer a college like Bowdoin over Harvard or vice versa. What were they thinking when they decided on colleges?”
It’s not weird to me that a 17-year-old might learn more about himself and his goals between October and May of senior year. I’m a lot older than that, and my preferences and plans change over 6-month periods all the time.
Thanks @contdes. Interesting idea. That could explain why SAT and ACT both are reported so low–maybe people who took only one test were reported as zero for other? If so, that would be a major flaw in Parchment. Whatever the explanation, my faith is Parchment is pretty low and I can’t muster much excitement about revealed preferences based on self-reported data that we know to be so unreliable in at least one area.
I agree, which is why I find it fascinating to be a thread on the parent’s forum. Having 17-year-olds argue about cross-admit ‘stats’ is one thing, but the 'rents?
There are a lot of parents talking back and forth pretty much any time someone posts something about one of the numerous college rankings published from time to time.