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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

You can probably read too much into a small drop in applications which is doubtless a Hail Mary to get into a prestigious institution for many/most applicants. That a few figured this maybe isn’t such a big deal after all to basically waste their money and time applying maybe isn’t that surprising.

Or it could be a blip for some reason.

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There was drama at my college one year, maybe my junior year? Because a higher ratio of people than expected confirmed their acceptance and they had too many freshman.

I wonder what the over-acceptance ratio is for ivy leagues. Just because you got in doesn’t mean you can afford to go.

My college's yield increased every year I was there, we got "the largest freshman class historically" four years in a row, even with their efforts to account for the new higher yield.

It's hard to accept the right number of applicants when yield isn't exactly linear year to year

The yield rates for the Ivy League schools are all over 60%. If they admit too many students, and their yield rate is unusually high one year, then they have the right to rescind admission of students, even if the students have already committed.

They have the right to do that, with the risk of tarnishing their reputation irrevocably.

It does go some ways to explain the existence of weed-out classes though.

You can sacrifice a little faculty and class space for freshman and sophomores if you know some fraction will not be showing up to 400- (or at some universities, 600-) level classes.

Elite universities don’t weed out to get rid of students, they need a super high graduation rate for the rankings metrics. But they can use weeders to get you to change your major to an easier one.

Most don’t and live with the crowding (recently happened at Purdue, Northeastern among others). But UCI rescinded aggressively in 2017 and nobody cares anymore. (You just have to actually enforce the things like “you need xyz GPA in your final semester” that they are often lax about.)

Agreed, any reason will just be speculation here. That said, the article could’ve given more information.

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