Comments on: Yale Early Action here to stay, questionable justification

By: Sam Jackson

Sam Jackson — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 15:36:12 +0000

Hmm, well, I’m only in a position to speculate as I don’t know what’s in the ‘black box’ of marketing and institutional cachet that would result in the downturn, I don’t know what’s expected or predicted as year-to-year fluctuation. The important thing, as the YDN pointed out, is that ‘2000 fewer thin envelopes in the spring won’t result in a worse class.’ I just don’t know where those fewer applicants are coming from, I am curious and worried about who might have been discouraged from applying. We’ll see soon enough, I suppose.

By: Observer

Observer — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 15:23:38 +0000

What do you make of the overall 9.7% decline in applications to Yale this year, even as app numbers were rising at most elites? Regular round apps were down 8%, after SCEA apps declined 13% compared to numbers for the Class of 2010.

By: Sam Jackson

Sam Jackson — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 21:27:51 +0000

Robert– I’m not in favor of such an interest-demonstrating system necessarily for just the sort of reasons you cite. However I feel that it could be a more accessible standardized metric of intreest than ea/ed so far as preference is concerned for the lack of F.A. barriers . A counter to the argument that there exists no other hypthetical indication of interest and a scenario which undermines some of those ea/ed arguments. : )

Also! I’ve posed the question “what do we think?” to the Yale 2011 kids, I’ll try to make a post about the responses once I get a few more.

By: James

James — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 19:42:54 +0000

Checking the first choice college seems like a bad deal for students who are applying to more than one school. Presently, many students do not apply anywhere early, and colleges that receive regular applications cannot easily separate the students who have applied early to other institutions from students who haven’t. This maximizes the proportion of students selected for merit, not hunger for the spot.

A bigger concern is that elite schools might virtually stop admitting anyone who doesn’t mark them as 1st. Yale will suspect that a perfect applicant wants to go to another elite school(she might and she might get rejected from that different school and have Yale as her second choice). Yale will then likely reject her. I suspect that the check-system would limit top students to having a realistic shot at only one top school, even more so as demographics continue to swell the applicant pools.

Granted, early admissions system does the same thing. However, it does so on a much smaller scale (at a lot of top schools the class is about 33-50% EA/ED, versus what I expect would be a much higher percentage 60-90% under a check-system).

So your alternative would make things less fair for every applicant in at least one dimension, but perhaps would be better for applicants in difficult financial situations. It isn’t readily apparent which is worse.