And as one of my colleagues points out in this article, it is "pretty much business as usual" at the elite schools.
No shocker here.
Applications to many of the most coveted institutions are...drum roll...up.
Yale received 4514 applications.
Brown 2957 apps.
Dartmouth 1526 apps (only Ivy down in volume).
And the outright winner by a landslide.
U of Chicago with 10,316 apps. A 18.6% increase.
Well played.
The game is certainly on.
Or maybe we should say - the game is pretty much already over for many applicants.
Cue the Jaws soundtrack.
If apps are up that means then that admits will be down.
Which means more bloody carnage.
Yale, for example, anticipates they will admit between 650-750 students.
They admitted 726 last year in early admission.
Now subtract around 180 of those admitted students.
That's the number of recruited athletes who will get in.
So now instead of a 14 to 16% admit rate in SCEA, we are really talking about a 10 to 11%.
So the difference between SCEA and Regular admission isn't as pronounced as it seems.
The only major difference is going to be the crushing volume of applications in regular admission.
Everyone who got deferred or denied in ED programs will dump their application into regular admission.
Heck, even students admitted in SCEA cycles might decide to throw their application into regular admission buckets.
So come March and April it's going to be Jaws meet Freddie Krueger (dating myself here).
As one consultant points out, however, for many in this early admission cycle, they are simply throwing up a "Hail Mary" by applying, where their credentials are profile negative, but who want to give a gambling try anyway.
These are the kind of applicants who are going to play the Doug Flutie clip over and over again, nurturing as long as possible their (and their parents) illusions of grandeur.
In the end, we are not going to see anything different in the admit pools than we did last year.
We will see the same usual suspects admitted.
Hooked kids.
Kids with the profile positive credentials (GPA, class rank, test score, AP's) along with an institutional credential (legacy, recruited athlete, 1st gen., diversity, international, engineering).
Business as usual, in other words.
