Yale Class of 2016 Calling all applicants!

I understand how hard the wait can be, but I would encourage you to keep your hopes and spirit up. If you are a fact-driven person like I am, I might be able to offer you a couple of reasons to try to look at the bright side:

- first off, there is reason to believe that the number of interviews being limited to a quarter is a bit too low. I was looking at the numbers and they don't really add up.

Yale had an applicant pool of approx. 2800 people last year. Ok, now they have a beautiful new building and rankings are going up, let's say their applicant pool increased roaring 6-7% again to 3000, out of which they invite 25% to interview. This would mean they talk to 750 ppl. Yale has also said (and some people have made such claims here in the forum too) that out of those 750 applicants ~60% will get accepted. This means 450 people will get happy news at the end of the entire process.
However, this brings us to the concept of the yield, which was roughly 48% according to poets and quants. Let's say again, new building, great dean, terrific school, they increased their yield again - to 50%.
That would mean that 225 pple will attend. We know however that Yale wants to have a class of 300 people this year. What does this mean? well, not much. But you could say with a quite degree of certainty that the yield will not increase much. And even if it did, the adcoms cannot know this in advance and the would probably operate with more conservative numbers.

The way I see it, is that somewhere down the line Yale is either extending invitations to more than 25% or they are admitting far more than 60% of people who interviewed.

Interpret it as you will, but in your case I would like to think that the first case might be true and there is still hope. Hope is what motivate us and is probably responsible to most of our achievements - don't lose it. Additionally, there is no plausible reason as to why the Admissions Committee should lie about the time when they extend interviews: They say you might get an invitation as late as the decision-deadline, there is no reason to think otherwise. In fact, there are couple of reasons to support this: They might want to see how other people performed in the interview, or how many people enrolled from R1 and they want to keep that wild-card until the very end. Again: Don't lose hope.

I wish you all the best of luck with the process.
bests regards from sunny Zurich.