Admissions: 2,175 (same as last year) (including 127 from WL)

Matriculants: 1,663 (up from 1.658 last year)

Admit rate: 7.5% (down from 7.9% last year)

Yield rate: 76.5% (up from 76.2% last year)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=1088867&forum_id=1#12767537)

Yale (claimed) applications: 26,003

Yale admits (including half the class from the high-yield early pool) 1,958

Yale admit rate - best case - 7.5%

Yale yield rate: 66.8%

Harvard applications: 29,114

Harvard admits (without the early admissions crutch) 2,175

Harvard admit rate - 7.5%

Harvard yield rate: 76.5%

Moreover, Princeton, Stanford, MIT and Harvard all have a higher peer ranking than Yale, according to US News, all are tied at the top with respect to "selectivity," and all do better with "open market" yield rate than does Yale. So does MIT. PENN and Yale are neck and neck in "open market" yield at around 53%.

Cheers!

And Harvard, as you know, has annually crushed Yale head to head with cross admits since shortly before the Civil War!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=1088867&forum_id=1#12818622)

As for its competitiveness with H, remember Y's class of 2012 - the one currently reported in USNWR - has higher SAT scores and % in top 10%. This years class (2013) has median (not to be confused with midpoint of 25-75 range) of 1500/2250, and so the spread may have widened.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=1088867&forum_id=1#12827040)

As a result, Yale gets to romance its admits for several months before they find out if they got in elsewhere. That, of course, was President Levin's intent: the APPEARANCE of reform, without the risks.

The SCEA yield is not really much lower than the binding ED yield was, and, pathetically, Yale still fills more than half the class from the 20% of applicants in the early pool.

Just as he did when he adopted binding ED for the Class of 2000, Levin outsmarted himself when he moved to SCEA for the Class of 2008 in order to expand Yale's shrinking early pool. Addicted to early admission like a junkie addicted to crack, Yale needed more and more early applicants to satisfy that addiction.

His acknowledged goal was to "steal" a few cross-admits from his rivals, but the goal has not been achieved. Yale's yield rate has not jumped, as he hoped, but rather has declined for 4 years in a row, despite the edge supplied by the early pool.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=1088867&forum_id=1#12832877)

As to your main argument, its simply wrong. Yale was kicking H and Ps butt in the size of its early action pool before H and P changed. Yale had a much larger pool than either. Also, remember, the kids getting in to Y early are among the brightest in the country, with sophisiticated parents and counsellors. Do you really think they are being seduced into attending a school they would not otherwise want? That simply is not good reasoning. Yales program is well thought out and works well for it. Harvards program is also a good one and serves its purposes well. The school that really got hurt - and all you have to do is read the hundreds of rueful comments in the Princetonian from Princeotn students in April 09 in response to their high admit rate - is princeton, whose top of the second tier status has been exposed.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=1088867&forum_id=1#12835085)

USNews and peer rankers know this, which is why they rank Princeton higher than Yale.

Yale's program "works well for it" you say? That is code for achieving an artificilly high yield rate by limiting competition with its peers as much as possible.

Yale (and Stanford, under the leadership of Yale's former admissions dean) are simply striving to rediuce the cross-admit overlap with Harvard, which has been whipping their butts for years.

Princeton shows its strength and confidence by being willing to go head to head with Harvard for the best and brightest without artificial yield-boosting devices. Sure, they lose most cross-admits, and it hurts the yield rate, but they have the strongest classes they've ever had.

Mark my words, the ever-scheming Levin will soon find that he has outsmarted himself again. Just as the benefits of the ED addiction eventually wore off, so will it be with SCEA, or "binding ED Lite."

Four straight years of yield rate decline and stalling out in the USNews rankings were not what he expected when he cynically abandoned his former principles in order to "serve Yale well."

If Harvard ever does what I hoped it would do earlier - announcing that it will henceforth ignore all "no poaching" proclamations by schools with early programs - the whole process will come tumbling down like a house of cards.

With a level playing field, which will "serve Harvard well", the yield rate a Yale will precipitously drop to the same level as Princeton's.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=1088867&forum_id=1#12841250)

Perhaps this is why Princeton has been rated higher than Yale in the USNews rankings every year since 1997.

Ironically - in further support of the theory that Levin's strategic maneuvering has worked against Yale's best interests, 1997 was the last time Yale ranked #1 in the USNews rankings, just as it adopted binding early decision!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=1088867&forum_id=1#12850666)

No one can seriously contend that P's yield is equal to or greater than Y's, or that it is as selective.

Don't overstate your case.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=1088867&forum_id=1#12866093)

This cynical "reform" was identified for what it was by contemporary editorialists in the YDN and the Yale Herald, at the time Harvard and Princeton swore off entirely, and Levin (predictably) abandoned his former principles, tempted by the possibility of "stealing" a few admits from his principal "rivals" while simultaneously reducing the size of the overlap pool.

Levin was quite candid and bitter in one blog interview, as you may recall - arguing that Harvard had impure motives for doing away with its early program. He concluded that what Harvard was trying to do was to force Yale to open up its entire pool of applicants for "poaching." Levin knew - and he knew that Harvard knew - that the larger the cross-admit pool the more Yale would be crushed by Harvard yield-rate- wise.

History has shown that a sizeable number of the applicants (even legacies) who Yale has considered "safe" - or "pro-Yale" as you put it - may very likely defect if given the opportunity to consider a contemporaneous admission to Harvard.

The SCEA program is designed to assure Yale a 3-month "exclusive negotiating period" to nail down the waverers, hoping to win their love by giving them their "first kiss", and also counting on inertia to discourage a number of those January 1 admits from exploring options in Cambridge, Princeton or Palo Alto.

Moreover, by tagging those who hopefully "truly want to go to Yale" as the phrase goes, and deferring most of them to the regular pool if not taken initially, Levin gives Yale a chance to reduce regular pool cross-admit losses further by admitting those deferrees at a rate more than twice as high as the poor, clueless "regular" applicants!

Repapa, you're lucky you don 't understand how the admissions game REALLY works; if you did, your faith in the nobility of the Yale strategizers that be would be so shaken that you might break down in tears!

That said, I don't exempt the Harvard strategists from having mixed motives as well. Harvard KNOWS that it will clean everybody's clock on a level playing field; so the more it can do to prevent other elites from reducing the size of the cross-admit pools the better off it will be.

The only limitation on the Yale's, Penn's, Columbia's, Stanford's, Brown's etc. is the generally accepted notion that if you get too piggy, and fill much more than half the class from your early pool, the generally clueless "regular" applicants may start to catch on, and look elsewhere.

When the admit rate is FOUR times as high for early pool applicants as it is for the 80% of regular pool applicants, it is clear that the schools are placing their own interests above that of the applicants. The "regular" applicants at the Yale's etc. are getting royally screwed.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=1088867&forum_id=1#12866950)

Yale didnt improve its yield by sticking with SCEA. Its yield has remained roughly constant. And it was doing quite nicely against H in the cross admit wars before H scrapped its early program altogether, winning more than 40%, according to Levin's quote in some Harvard publication (it may not have been the Crimson, but it was discussed on this site and you can find it Im sure).

Also, where are you getting your facts from re Yales early acceptance rate being 4X higher than its regular decision rate? Its overall admit rate this year was 7%. Its early rate was approximately 13% and its regular rate was between 5% and 6%. The rate differential was therefore approx 2x-2.5X. And that doesnt mean that it was twice as hard to get into Yale regular decision than early decision, as the Yale early pool is the most competitive applicant pool in the country, including as it does not only those who genuinely want Yale as their first choice but also those who genuinely prefer Harvard or even Princeton.

The real game player here is Harvard, resorting to massive use of its wait list (200 or so acceptees a year) in order to boost its yield from 74% to 76%. If you dont think Harvard plays games, where is the press release telling the world that with its 200 WL acceptees its admit rate rose to 7.5%, the same final admit rate as Yale's? Of course it was with great fanfare that H announced its preliminary record-breaking April admit rate of 6.9%, which it knew would not stand. H plays these little games because it likes to be perceived as the unquestioned most selective college in the country, which it is not (though it is tied for first).

What you have to understand is that, unlike P, Y didn't feel the need to be H's poodle here. I know that rankles, but that also reflects the relative competitive strengths (or in P's case, weaknesses) of the 3 institutions.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=1088867&forum_id=1#12868794)

He has tended to outsmart himself at every turn in tinkering with the admissions process during his presidency.

First he denounces Early Decision, then he embraces it, then he says he really wants to get rid of it, if only Yale's rivals will go along, then, when exactly that opportunity presents itself, he backtracks yet again, rightly fearful that Yale would be placing itself at a competitive disadvantage in going head to head with Harvard on a level playing field.

There does not seem to be any consistent philosophy guiding his tinkering efforts, unless it is to do whatever strikes him as in Yale's short term interest, based on survey and polling data.

You may think he simply doesn't want to "be Harvard's poodle", but the sad fact is that everything he does is in frantic reaction to some prior initiative Harvard has taken, whether revising admissions programs, increasing financial aid or whatever.

--------------------

Oh, and there were not 200 off the WL this year at Harvard but rather 120. Stanford took 127. It really doesn't affect to

the yield rate that much when you get 3 out of every 4 you admit, as Harvard does, or 7 out of 10, as Stanford does.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=1088867&forum_id=1#12870292)

And unlike Yale, Harvard does not continue to count incomplete or withdrawn applications in the total after it is clear they should not be.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=1088867&forum_id=1#12884209)