Seeing red at Harvard

A sea of red at Harvard's commencement yesterday...

The Ph.D. grads got out of their gowns pretty fast as they came to lunch...

way to go, Judd.

Harvard legacy and waitlist admissions

The Crimson reports: Legacy Admit Rate at 30 Percent

"Harvard’s acceptance rate for legacies has hovered around 30 percent—more than four times the regular admission rate—in recent admissions cycles, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 told The Crimson in an interview this week.

Fitzsimmons also said that Harvard’s undergraduate population is comprised of approximately 12 to 13 percent legacies, a group he defined as children of Harvard College alumni and Radcliffe College alumnae.

"Fitzsimmons’ comments came the week after a discussion at New York University on legacy admissions between Yale Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Jeffrey Brenzel, senior fellow at The Century Foundation Richard D. Kahlenberg ’85, and Bloomberg News editor at large Daniel L. Golden ’78.

"According to a New York Times story on the event, Brenzel said that Yale rejected 80 percent of its legacy applicants. Brenzel reported that Yale legacies comprise less than 10 percent of the class, according to Kahlenberg.

"Brenzel also said that there is a positive correlation between alumni donations and legacy admissions. According to Brenzel, Yale fundraising suffers when fewer legacies are accepted. Still, he said, this year Yale rejected more children of top donors than it accepted.

...

"Fitzsimmons defended Harvard’s legacy admissions rate.

“If you look at the credentials of Harvard alumni and alumnae sons and daughters, they are better candidates on average,” said Fitzsimmons, part of what he sees as the explanation for the disparity in the acceptance rate. “Very few who apply have no chance of getting in.”

"Because of the family background of legacies, he said, students are more likely to be aware if they are unlikely to be accepted."
********

In other 2011 admissions news...
Higher Yield Means Few Waitlist Admissions
"The yield for Harvard College’s Class of 2015 increased to nearly 77 percent, up slightly from 75.5 percent last year, the University announced Thursday morning. The yield at Harvard, which measures what percentage of accepted students choose to attend, is typically among the highest in the nation.

Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 said that he anticipates his office will admit approximately 10-15 students off the waitlist this year, with some decisions potentially coming as early as this Tuesday. This number is far lower than the 50 to 125 students Fitzsimmons previously said his office generally hopes to admit each year."

Harvard's mysterious Z-list

One of the more unusual routes to admission at Harvard is the Z-list, which the Crimson writes about this week. Z-Listed Students Experience Year Off: Undergrads take mandatory gap year before coming to Harvard

Last year I wrote about it here: Harvard's "Z-list," waitlist admission with a difference .

It's that mandatory year off that makes the Z-list unusual (students who enter from the Z-list must delay a year and can't attend another school while they wait).

The mystery is to whom this admissions option is offered, and who chooses to accept. There's some signaling going on here, and some sorting.

Market for class notes, posted by students

There are lots of sites that sell study aids to college students, and there are lots of college courses whose notes are posted online (e.g. see my courses on Market Design and Experimental Economics). The Boston Globe reports on a site, FinalsClub.org, that pays students to post their class notes, after getting permission of the professor. Some of my Harvard colleagues have given their permission, and some have not.

Harvard's "Z-list," waitlist admission with a difference

Even Harvard gives favorable attention to legacies (children of alums), you are no doubt shocked to learn. But, right around this time of year, as offers are made off the waiting list, some of those alumni children, and others with certain special late-season Harvard offers, are being given a potentially hard choice: The Back Door to the Yard Z-list: A legacy-heavy special admissions program .

The Z list students are admitted after a year delay, on the unusual condition that they don't attend college anywhere else in the intervening year. The Crimson story (from several years ago) described the program, and found that it included a substantial proportion of legacy students. (emphasis added):

"This group of students, known within Byerly Hall as the “Z-list,” are plucked off the waitlist any time from May to August—after they have accepted offers of admission at other universities—and informed that if they are willing to take a year off, they can enroll at Harvard the following September.Harvard admissions officers say they choose to “Z” students—it’s a verb—when there is a consensus that the College cannot bear to reject them but there is simply no bed available for them immediately after they graduate high school.“There’s no formula to this and there’s not much in common [between Z-list students],” says Director of Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis ’70-’73. “It makes us feel we made some effort to get them here.”But if you talk to enough of these students whom the admissions office makes a special effort to bring to Cambridge, you’ll find they do have something in common: Their parents went to Harvard."
...
"Other top colleges have special admissions programs in which applicants are asked to take time off or enroll elsewhere and then transfer, but no other Ivy requires students to take a year off and gets them to come in such high proportions—a testament to the College’s perennial superiority in admissions.And if a year off makes students more mature and better able to contribute to the College, then the Z-list allows Harvard to placate powerful parents without diluting the quality of its class."
...
"“A very high percentage are alumni cases,” agrees Susan G. Case, a college counselor at Milton Academy, which in some years has sent Harvard a quarter of the Z-list all by itself. “There isn’t necessarily an academic pattern, but it’s usually institutional needs. That’s a phrase they use internally.”"

Market design is coming of age

There are an increasing number of signs that Market Design is coming of age as a distinct area of economics. Here are three.

The National Bureau of Economic Research has formed a new Market Design Working Group. Susan Athey and Parag Pathak have organized its first conference, for May 15-16, 2009. Here is the preliminary program.

My Market Design course at Harvard, which for many years used to stand alone, is this year part of a two-semester sequence, with the second semester being Economics 2056b. Topics in Market Design - (New Course) offered by my colleagues Susan Athey and Greg Lewis. More of our Ph.D. students are choosing market design as a field, and we've had some great graduates in the decade I've been at Harvard (all of whom do other things as well:), including Estelle Cantillon, Muriel Niederle, John Asker, Michael Ostrovsky , Ben Edelman, Parag Pathak, Fuhito Kojima, Robin Lee and (this year) Eric Budish and Mihai Manea.

Oxford University Press is preparing a Handbook of Market Design, edited by Nir Vulcan, Muriel Niederle , and Zvika Neeman.