Just checked UNC-CH, where S is heading. Like GT, they yield at the manipulated level of the privates being discussed. Same with UCB and UCLA. On the other hand, I am sure you are right with the ones outside the top 10 publics. UTA also great yield.
I completely agree with this. However, one thing I’ve noticed is that it’s not always the “ranking” that kids are responding to, it’s the admissions rate itself. I think this is why a Northeastern, for example, captures so much mindshare of applicants.
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This is my experience as well. A lot more kids focused on admissions rates of schools than rankings. If it is really hard to get into, that is attractive. If admissions rate too high, they are concerned people will think they couldn’t get into a harder to get into school.
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So, is your premise that EA at WashU is fake, and they will just use it as a tool to pressure kids to ED and admit no to few kids EA? If so, what is your basis for that? If not, help me understand why you think them adding EA is not a good thing if that is what you are saying.
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Yes - they accept 25% in ED, but 2% in RD and that can be marketed as 7%.
It is more of a hunch based on how others are using EA. EA at a school that has ED1 and ED2 and RD seems to become a filtering tool.
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Got it. And how does that play out at those other schools for the kid who likes the school, but is not willing to commit to ED? I ask as someone whose kid dramatically slashed their list because they got into a school they liked EA (it was not one of these “elite striving” colleges though). Granted, she did not choose to attend that EA school, but it significantly reduced its own competition by admitting her early and it was way better for her/us that she got in early. By the way, the school she ultimately chose was not one of the most selective ones she got into as models/assumptions might predict. Rather it was a moderately selective one that wooed her.
I “think” they still apply EA hoping the admit rate will be higher than RD knowing they might get pushed into ED2.
In my son’s recent situation, this worked better when there was not some hyper competitive b-school he applied into.
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WashU’s core institutional development strategy has been in place for a long time now, and it is to keep increasing their financial resources, not least through giving and research, and then use those resources to attract top faculty and build world-class facilities. They long ago succeeded in becoming one of the top biomedical institutions, with a top research med school, but they have been investing in all sorts of other areas as well, including business, CS & engineering, law, arts, and so on.
To the extent they have a “thing” it is being particularly conducive to interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary research and studies, which at the undergrad level includes making it easy to do lots of combinations of diverse majors and minors. But really they are in fact going for all-around-excellent, and in that sense an institution like Penn is a fair example of what they are trying to achieve.
And all that has already demonstrably been working, like they have come a LONG way from institution they were back in, say, the early 1960s. But I do think they have had some recent marketing issues as well.
One of the biggest is back when the NYT sort off kicked of the “expose” era for elite private colleges and their relative lack of socioeconomic diversity as compared to public colleges, WashU was tagged as one of the worst. Since then WashU has done a variety of things to improve in these measures, and it has demonstrably improved in relevant measures over where it used to be, but so have lots of other private colleges and universities. So it hasn’t improve as much in relative terms as it has in absolute terms. And it is still nowhere near a typical flagship public.
It also does get fewer applications than you might otherwise expect given its institutional attributes, and its RD yield is on the low side as well. I don’t think it is a mystery that its location in St Louis is a hard sell for many kids from the coasts or indeed outside the United States, so I think that is really the main explanation. But they can’t change their location or perceptions of St Louis, so that represents a serious marketing challenge.
When it comes to things like offering non-binding EA with a decision date before RD applications are due, I don’t see that as a remotely bad marketing strategy when it comes to the applicant side of things. Since it is non-binding, all it really does is give them a head start on persuading admitted students to seriously consider them. That can really only be to the advantage of students–if that helps some more students see WashU as a great fit, then great. If not, no harm done.
Same deal with more clarity around demonstrated interest. In my circles, it was already considered a fact that WashU cared about whether a highly-qualified applicant was a reasonable chance to actually yield. Whether that technically qualifies as considering demonstrated interest in the CDS sense or not. So to me, anything that helps explain to interested applicants what can help demonstrate that interest to WashU is a good thing.
Things like the early scholarship deadline and dropping a supplemental essay I am basically neutral about. I don’t think kids who are actually serious about trying to get one of those scholarships at WashU will typically find it hard to make that deadline, and they never bothered me other places my S24 applied. I think essays in general are starting to be downgraded, and I gather part of the issue is what AI might be doing to them. So again, not something I particular lament.
As a final big picture thought–as always, the ranking mindset imposes an artificial zero-sum logic. If Institution A rises in the rankings, some other Institutions B, C, and D must fall.
But substantively, there is zero reason why Institution A cannot improve itself while Institutions B, C, and D are all maintaining the same quality, or indeed improving themselves.
Part of why US college admissions have gotten so ridiculously selective at the top is that the capacity of the traditional “top” institutions did not expand to meet demand. Basically, both nationally and increasingly internationally, there has been a huge increase in highly-qualified kids looking to attend such an institution, and not a corresponding increase in slots at these institutions.
Given this market dynamic, other institutions have taken the opportunity to compete for these applicants. And it has worked. Many other institutions besides the “usual suspects” have, over recent decades, demonstrably been able to increase their own selectivity, not just in superficial terms like acceptance rates, but in terms of the actual composition of their enrolled students.
I don’t particularly see a reason to see this as a problem. A growing demand exists in a market, the incumbents don’t expand to meet it, so new suppliers enter the market. That’s all just market capitalism doing its thing.
But of course there will always be some sentiment that the newcomers are inherently inferior to the incumbents. And that can last a long time, but eventually, the newcomers aren’t so much the newcomers anymore, and then it is on to being snobby about the next wave of newcomers . . . .
There are many schools with EA.
I have heard of this sort of pressuring happening at one, Chicago. Are you aware of a lot of cases of it happening other places with EA?
Tulane-like places that do not hide the game.
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This is basically one of the big reasons the admissions dean at Connecticut College noted on a recent episode of the Your College Bound Kid podcast. It’s potentially a way to increase yield by marketing to admitted students for a longer period of time. He had noted they already moved up their regular decision release date by two weeks this year as a way to try to give them more time to get students excited. I could see WashU employing a very similar strategy of trying to build excitement and get a student to yield.
Or… it could be a UChicago style defer and push to ED2! 
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Mostly agree, but there is something icky when a TO school accepting more than 60% ED dumbs down their application and touts that their admit rate will get lower. Forbes is somewhat bought these days btw.
So Tulane and Chicago. Any other specific cases?
Yeah,Tulane tried to get my kid to change to ED2.
I’m not sure what the deal with the rankings is and these strategies, using Tulane as an example. It was ranked (USNWR) at 40 when my kid applied, it’s now 69. If it’s trying to manipulate rankings (as opposed to admit rates), it’s not working. FWIW my kid only applied because they gave her an application fee waiver and she didn’t do the optional supplement, so all she had to do was press a button on the common app.
Back to WashU, given the early EA announcement date I’m inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt here because that helps students. Most of my kid’s EA schools (all less selective than these ones) only announced decisions late January.
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And then you have the schools that put a lot of pressure on students to change their RD applications to ED 1 or 2. Looking at you Lehigh.
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So according to their last CDS, WashU accepted 1217 of 4817 ED applications, which is just over 25%. As an aside, I have a working theory that even at the most popular private colleges, the actual admit rate among the truly competitive applicants is much higher than the published admit rate, because so many uncompetitive applicants apply to them on “lottery ticket” reasoning. And when ED is filtering for a combination of mostly hooked applicants plus actually competitive unhooked applicants, logically the admit rate SHOULD be higher.
I have a feeling what you may have meant is that WashU reported enrolling 1847 students, and 1217 is almost 66% of 1847. Realistically, probably all 1217 did not enroll, from other data I have seen ED yield might be more like 97% give or take. But it is definitely true that WashU got a significant majority of its actual enrollees out of ED.
Again, just superficially, nothing is too surprising about this. If you assume that highly qualified applicants who actually like WashU the best among their likely options tend to apply ED, then you should expect a high percentage of their enrolled class to follow that path.
However, in total WashU admitted 3951 applicants, so ED admits were only just under 31% of all admits. The reason the percentage of admits is so much lower than the percentage of enrolled students is precisely because almost all the ED admits enroll, and only a minority fraction of the non-ED admits enroll. Again as expected.
Still, WashU is indeed obviously not entirely content with the status quo. Again, I think it is quite reasonable for them to think things like there may be highly qualified applicants who are not willing to commit to WashU for ED, but that might be persuaded to at least put WashU higher on their list if WashU admits them EA and starts the admitted students marketing process early.
If that in fact works, then it is true their non-ED yield is likely to increase at least marginally. Mathematically, if their non-ED yield increases marginally, and their non-ED applications do not decline, then their non-ED acceptance rate will go down, again at least marginally. That’s really all just math.
OK, so you think of this as “icky”. That’s up to you, of course. Personally, though, I could not care less about the mathematical implications. What I care about is whether this is good for the kids or not.
And at least as described so far, this is pro kids. What is NOT happening in a case like this is kids who shouldn’t be at WashU taking slots from kids who should be at WashU. All that is happening is some kids liking WashU more with more time to think about and learn about WashU.
I understand you are confident WashU is going to do something else, specifically contact EA applicants and try to pressure them to convert to ED2 applicants. If that actually happens, I will agree with you that is not pro kid.
But for now, I personally see no problem with WashU offering EA, regardless of what that means for its published statistics.
Northeastern. There are others.
I agree. It does not even work 1/2 the time!
I mean the percentage they take ED, not the acceptance rate ED.