Notes from the committee room

Applying early means something different at each school, and the clearest sign is what happens to the applicants who aren't admitted.

• Harvard defers most of them. For the Class of 2028, about 83% of early applicants were deferred and about 8% were rejected.
• MIT also defers most: about 65% deferred and 23% rejected for the Class of 2030.
• Yale does the opposite. For the Class of 2030, about 70% of early applicants were denied and 18% deferred.

So a deferral from Harvard says little about your file, while a deferral from Yale means you were competitive. Our committee reads each round by that school's own habits instead of one rule for every school.

At the most selective schools, far more applicants clear the academic bar than can be admitted. In the data from the Harvard trial, about 40% of applicants received one of the top two academic ratings. The admit rate was a small fraction of that.

That is why our chair treats academics as a gate. Clearing it is roughly neutral. Falling clearly below it is serious. What separates files above the bar is the depth of the activities, the essays and the fit with the school.

Another ten points on the SAT rarely changes the read. A second year of real work on one thing often does.

A percentage sounds rigorous. To produce an honest one, we would need the outcomes of thousands of files like yours at the same school, in the same round, and nobody outside the admissions office has that.

What can be modelled is the read itself: how each part of a file is rated on the school's scales, and which decision those ratings usually lead to. So that is what the report gives you, along with the reasons, which you can act on in a way you can't act on “38%”.