Thanks @CaringMom11 but I still feel like I’m missing something. It makes sense that Milton would have a smaller freshman class & 135 is a sensible number. It also makes sense that 181 students or thereabouts graduated in 2014. 180 x 3 + 135= 675; still not 695 but much closer. But if you graduate 181 students, don’t you have to yield 181 students, or overall enrollment shrinks? So 135 freshmen + 15 sophomores & juniors still leaves you 30 new students short. Unless total enrollment is actually shrinking.
~90 (boarding) +45 day + (~40-45 from 8th grade) = closer to 175 (the numbers wont add up since they are rough figures…I am not 100% on boarding number but pretty close on the other 2 numbers.
Wait until college admissions. 
Got it! Thanks … I think I just misread your first post … sorry about that!
From the SPS website (that is a huge yield):
Record Yield for Admissions
4/21/2015
Seventy-nine percent of the 238 students admitted to St. Paul’s School for 2015-16 have decided to enroll at the School in the fall. The 187 new students include 96 boys and 91 girls.
“That is our highest yield ever,” says Dean of Admission Scott Bohan ’94. “I believe it speaks to the process; admitted students feel like they have a connection here, that St. Paul’s is the right fit for them.”
Consistent with numbers collected from the last few cycles, 1,524 students applied to St. Paul’s for the 2015-16 academic year. Of that number, only 15.6% were offered admission to the School in a pool that featured 30% of applicants who registered grade-point averages of 4.0 or above.
Among the 238 admitted students are 120 girls and 118 boys from 33 states and 19 countries, including Vietnam, Turkey, Russia, the United Arab Emirates, and the Bahamas. A total of 995 students applied for the Third Form, 377 for the Fourth Form, and 152 for the Fifth Form. New student enrollment includes 113 Third Formers, 57 Fourth Formers, and 17 Fifth Formers. Included in the SPS enrollment numbers for 2015-16 are 77 (41%) new students of color.
Total enrollment for the Fall Term is expected to be around 539 students.
Bohan says the School had particular success this year with reaching students domestically. That is due to additional efforts recently to attract students from non-traditional American markets and also because of the availability of opportunities through several regional scholarships. The Hunt Scholarship for students from the El Paso, Texas, region, will bring two new students to SPS, while the Greene Scholarship (Alabama) and Meyer Scholarship (South Carolina) have encouraged more students from those states – scholarship recipients and non-recipients – to enroll at the School than in previous years. Nine out of 10 candidates for the Ross Scholarship (Northern New Jersey) have enrolled at St. Paul’s, regardless of whether they received the scholarship. New students will also attend SPS on the Burke (California/Wyoming), Cook (Montana), and Heinz (Pennsylvania) Scholarships.
Thirty-eight percent of all students enrolled at St. Paul’s will receive some form of tuition assistance during the 2015-16 academic year.
Bohan is pleased to see the diversification of enrollment both domestically and internationally. He notes that the SPS admission staff continues to meet students with special interests in math and science, particularly engineering, adding that prospective parents see St. Paul’s as a place where their children can pursue a wide variety of subjects and activities. The two spring visits for admitted students confirmed for many, says Bohan, that St. Paul’s is the right place for them.
“I think people walked away saying that we have nice, smart, talented kids at St. Paul’s,” he says, “and they want to be a part of that.”
Exeter had a 76% yield - more than they expected.
http://theexonian.com/2015/04/23/high-yield-for-15-16-year-to-crowd-dorms/
April 23 post to Thacher’s Facebook page:
“It’s been another big year for Thacher admissions (due in part to our team of enthusiastic tour guides pictured in our cover photo). Thacher’s acceptance rate declined 1 point to a record low of 12 percent. Our yield, the percentage of admitted students who choose Thacher, also set a record: 88 percent. And overall, applications were up 6 percent.”
Wow!!
So obviously not every school can go up in yield. I’d be interested to know what schools went down in yield?
There used to be angry arguments about statistics on this site with an inordinate amount of attention paid to SSAT, SAT scores and Ivy outcomes as the way to tell good from great. My view has always been that there is negligible academic difference among the top 25 or so boarding schools and that the most important stats among that group are actually yield and attrition. They tell a story about the quality, cohesion, happiness and satisfaction of a particular boarding school community.
Yield could be up across the board if admission rates were down across the board.
This comes from the admission officer at the school during one of the receptions. So is not something Milton promote, but it came from the horse’s mouth.
this is how the numbers look like:
Normal year class of 150, though because a few years ago they accepted too many (recent class just graduated was 180 as someone says). The last 3 years Milton has been accepting less and less.
So if you take class of 150, half boarder = 75, and half day student = 75.
1100 applicants for boarders, around 60% yield, you get 11-12%.
They also get 400+ for day student applicants. But of the 75 day students, 40+ goes to Milton middle school. So there is really 30-35 spots. Again 60% yield, you get roughly 11-12% acceptance rate too
so boarder acceptance 11-12%
day student acceptance from outside 11-12%
day student acceptance from Milton Middle school - maybe not 100%, but something like that.
That’s how you get to these #. Of course, if the class is smaller like 135, some of the #s change accordingly. But the boarder acceptance rate of slightly less than 12% is from the admission officer