Why Does Everybody Want to go to Harvard?
Posted on May 12th, 2006 in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »
The class of 2010’s yieldâthe percentage of accepted applicants who choose Harvardâhas come in at 80%, a record, according to the Crimson.
This is rather remarkable, coming after a year in which the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences was ousted, the president resigned, and a celebrity student imploded amidst a plagiarism scandal.
The news, as they say, was not good.
So why are the numbers going up?
Dean of Admissions William Fitzsimmons argues that it’s because the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative is so appealing, but since no numbers of how many students are coming under the terms of that initiative are provided, it’s impossible to know whether that’s true. I’m sure it’s a factor, but does it explain everything?
I wonder if these numbers don’t suggest the truth of that adage that “all publicity is good publicity.”
Is it possible that modern students just don’t care about how a university makes news…as long as it’s in the news? Is this just another manifestation of the American obsession with celebrity?
It’ll be interesting to see Duke’s yield this year….
8 Responses
5/12/2023 10:08 am
I think Bill Fitzsimmons’ explanation is a good one to explain the high yield (at least partly). It’s fair to expect this new financial aid initiative would increase the yield for the disadvantaged group of students. And, surely a lot of students from advantaged backgrounds want to go to school with a diverse student body. So these richer students might accept in higher numbers also because of how the new financial aid program will change their student experience. Also, more simply, the initiative generated its own share of press - positive press - that might partly outweigh the significant amount of bad press.
5/12/2023 10:11 am
Or, alternatively, is it possible that you have overrated the importance to students (and perhaps even to the polity itself) of these earthshaking issues? Your comments feel just the slightest bit petulant to me, and a tad naive. Students go to Harvard, and have always done so, because it is the pinnacle of status achievement. From that perspective, stuff like plagiarism scandals and presidents resigning
just doesn’t matter at the level it does to the blogocracy. Indeed, those sorts of things are expected to happen in the bigtime. If I’m a young wanne-be model from West Va. mining country hoping to make it big in New York, do you think a couple of articles in New York magazine about models getting slashed, murdered, committing suicide, OD’ing, etc etc is going to scare me off? Wake up and smell the coffee. Harvard will survive — and will continue to churn out overprivileged and undereducated middle class strivers for years to come.
5/12/2023 10:15 am
*My* comment is petulant?
I agree with your points about the financial aid initiative, which I think has had a real impact. Awareness of that among high school students is, I bet, very high.
And yes, it’s probably true that students care less about scandals and crises than do people like me.
Even so…it all raises the question of whether there’s any amount of bad publicity that can hurt Harvard.
5/12/2023 10:20 am
The second poster’s comments don’t explain why the yield went up this year. Certainly, it’s clear that - for some time at least - bad news won’t make any difference to students thinking Harvard is the gold standard. But why more so than last year? Harvard either sold itself better to admitted students this year than it had done previously, or the other schools did a worse job. There could be several explanations (beyond the financial aid initiative), but certainly the contrast to the year before is there.
5/12/2023 10:39 am
The financial aid pkg would be a reason for applications to be up, but I’m not sure it would necessarily drive yield up, unless there were a lot more students from lower income backgrounds who applied and did not accept b/c of cost in years past. It would seem to me that they would know the cost ahead of time, by and large, and would not apply.
5/12/2023 11:05 am
> unless there were a lot more students from lower income backgrounds who applied and did not accept b/c of cost in years past.
Yes, obviously, exactly. Many students apply to schools without fully considering the payment issues, still more apply to schools and then choose based on the strength of the various financial aid packages they are awarded. Harvard has in the past lost many qualified candidates, especially in the middle range of $40000-$60000 to state schools or other institutions willing to give students a full ride when Harvard provided only partial funds. Financial aid packages are extremely variable and applicants don’t find out about their individual status until after they are admitted, so yes, it is very conceivable that many people applied, got in, and opted in the past for schools that would defray costs more than Harvard.
Furthermore, the spillover effect alluded to by the first anonymous is significant, and one reason that numbers only about who is qualifying under HFAI would not tell the whole story (although those too would be nice). Many people who didn’t qualify for significant financial aid who may have shunned Harvard in the past based on its reputation of elitism and insularity may now be reconsidering it as a more attractive option.
5/12/2023 4:53 pm
And perhaps when you’re trying to sell something there truly is no such thing as bad press.
5/17/2006 1:01 am
i’d have loved to go to harvard. then again, that was 20+ years ago. (even typing that number is surreal)