<p>I know Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all recently went SCEA (single choice early action). I was wondering why hasn’t Brown followed suit? I don’t think Brown should be that worried about yield because:</p>
<h1>1 Brown is already a very popular school among students</h1>
<h1>2 Yield isn’t really that important</h1>
<p>SCEA invites more people to apply, thus generating a more competitive early action pool. With more competition, Brown will get more competitive applicants (i.e. top-notch students who formerly couldn’t apply ED because they may get enough financial aid to go; students that want to get a good school in the bag early, as opposed to applying SCEA to HYPSM, where it’s more of a crapshoot). Being a prestigious and selective school, Brown will accept the best of these applicants-- leaving students who may have gotten in during a smaller (thus less competitive) ED round in the dust. Many of the applicants who got in SCEA to Brown will be of HYPSM standard (remember, they’re applying to Brown to secure at least one Ivy/T20) and could very possibly get in to one of them. If that is the case, they will likely choose to go to the HYPSM school instead of Brown. With so many top-notch students who got in to Brown SCEA now not choosing to enroll, Brown could very likely have a smaller class than they intended (I’m not trying to be clairvoyant, just a prediction) and students that could have gotten into Brown had they been part of the last class that was allowed to apply ED are now royally screwed.</p>
<p>I think that’s largely the reason why the other five Ivies have ED as opposed to SCEA, because they know their yield for the SCEA acceptances will be far too low. This, unfortunately, could ultimately lead to something to Tufts Syndrome (this is beginning to sound like an overly-dramatic prognosis, so I’ll stop now). Because of potentially having a smaller class than they need, I think they want to play it safe and have a couple hundred kids enrolled for the fall before January. Also, because they’ll have a lower yield than HYPSM (who have SCEA), they won’t know how many kids they need to accept RD as the number of enrolling students that got in during the EA round is up in the air. If they do move to SCEA, the admissions office would have a logistical nightmare the first few years in trying to determine class size.</p>
<p>Also, why do you ask specifically if Brown should go SCEA, and not of the other half of the Ivy League that also has an Early Decision program?</p>
<p>Columbia/Penn/Brown/Dartmouth/Cornell all have ED instead of SCEA because they want to protect their yield rates, and yield rate is important.</p>