Quote:
Originally Posted by jahizbarlas
those are all things that i had heard. basically they want to see how competitive their initial package should be, and if you will actually decide to come given your list
i think they also go back and look at this list when you are renegociating the package provided you have gotten in...
the question then is, whats the optimal strategy in this game?
i would guess giving a subset of the schools you will be applying to that are closely ranked to the one's application you are filling.
so its like your telling the truth, as you do in second price auctions, but not really......
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Basically what I did. I found that almost all applications only gave enough room for 4-6 schools. So I just mentioned ones in a similar cohort to the department for whom I was doing the application. I think this is both good strategy and honesty. The former for reasons stated above and the latter because when I make my decision, Yale is not really competing with UC-Santa Cruz. Assuming the process works out in some sort of rational way (may or may not be a safe assumption
) an applicant will be choosing from admits in roughly the same cohort, so that is who they are really competing against. It's not as honest as telling them every school, but they generally don't give enough room for that.