<p>The authors of “The Early Admissions Game” and the “Revealed Preference” study seem to think that the is limited utility, in the long run, to heavy reliance on “Tufts Syndrome.” </p>
<p>Eventually, a school that looks to goose its yield rate by rejecting or waitlisting highly qualified applicants who, it suspects, are likely to gain admission to a school further up the academic food chain, hurts itself by trimming the quality of the class as measured by SAT scores, fraction in the top 10% of their high school class, etc. </p>
<p>(It was noted, for example, that Princeton’s one-time tendency to dodge certain applicants it viewed as ticketed for Harvard or Yale left it with a lower SAT median.)</p>