<p>Sam, that’s a fair criticism. I think it’s likely that Chicago has a higher yield among its EA admits than among its RD admits. And Chicago would almost certainly have a lower RD yield if it had an ED program to capture the low-hanging fruit in its applicant pool. So it’s not completely fair to compare Chicago’s overall yield to Northwestern’s RD yield. In the end, the overall numbers are the overall numbers.</p>
<p>I think unalove is probably unusual in calling it a day after her EA admit, however. I know a number of kids who were admitted to Chicago EA, and none of them failed to apply elsewhere. (Many of them had already applied elsewhere when the EA results came out.) Also, you ought to acknowledge that from a game theory standpoint, Northwestern’s ED program is much harsher to students than Chicago’s EA. Northwestern says, effectively, “You can double your chance of admission if you commit to us in advance and waive financial aid competition, and you are willing to live or die by your early application.” Comparatively few students take it up on that, only about 6.5% of applicants. Whereas Chicago’s program really doesn’t restrict or penalize early applicants at all, and unsurprisingly attracts a much greater percentage of overall applicants. We really don’t know how many students in either university’s early pool thought of the school as “Mr. Right” vs. “Mr. Right Now”.</p>
<p>Here’s another flaw in the analysis, in the interest of full disclosure: I was using 2006 numbers for Northwestern and 2007 numbers for Chicago, in part because they were the latest I had for both, but in part also because by coincidence that meant both schools got almost exactly the same number of applications per slot, so it took the “self-selecting applicants” issue out of the analysis. If I had used 2006 Chicago numbers, there were almost 1,000 fewer applications, so Northwestern would have been more selective in any event. And for all I know Northwestern had 17,000 or 18,000 applications in 2007, or accepted only 4,500 kids to fill its class.</p>
<p>I don’t think one could really support the position that Chicago is any more selective than Northwestern. I do think that one can support the proposition that the differences in the schools’ selectivity metrics is in large part a function of Northwestern’s ED program design.</p>