[Aurornis]

It’s not about dumpee or dumper or rankings games.

Admissions has to target a fixed number of students each year, plus or minus. Students have to decide where to attend in a narrow window. If you accept a lot of students who are unlikely to attend then you would undershoot your admissions target and have to try to convince students to attend in later rounds of admission, but that’s too late because they’ve already decided to go somewhere else.

[nerdsniper]

If the acceptance rate wasn’t being gamed, they could accept a lot more of the top candidates - they would have years of statistical data knowing that only x% of those top students will commit.

It’s not really a risk to overaccept if you know what % will commit.