Gary King, John M. Bruce and Michael Gilligan,
First, for students on the margin of being admitted, Harvard accepts those who have resources to attend, even if the admissions committee ranks them below impecunious students we reject. Second, all minorities receive our maximum financial aid package regardless of need.5 These policies affect roughly 3-10 students from our primary list and all minorities every year. In all of our analyses, below, we consider an applicant “admitted” if the admissions committee ranked the candidate on the primary or Affirmative Action lists. Because of our financial aid policy, some of those we consider “admitted” for the purposes of this paper actually do get rejected from the program. About 707 of students who are admitted eventually attend, although we usually receive all or almost all of our top choices and Affirmative Action admittees.
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