<p>Yield dicussions don't mean much unless you understand what schools are choosen in place of the school under review. If Amherst and Williams have low yields because the students that turn them down go to HPY that is much different than someone turning down Fordham to go to Bucknell.</p>
<p>Tulane has a yield of only 11%?!</p>
<p>Seems like a whole lot of fishing to land a very few fish.</p>
<p>When yield is so low, does it suggest a school is not paying enough attention to fit? Or that they are chasing higher quality students who prefer more selective schools?</p>
<p>The data is based on 2006, the year after Katrina.</p>
<p>It seems like several high-yield LACs are "specific purpose" - religious or political ideals. Hillsdale's yield is relatively high because no one applies there who is not interested in the stated values of the school. I would assume the same is true for Wheaton (IL) and for BYU as well. Unlike, say, Allegheny Col or even Colgate - where there is less of a particular focus in its applicant pool.</p>
<p>Still, the numbers are fascinating. Some social scientist with time on his/her hands could really make some hay with this.</p>
<p>I did some calculations last summer in the context of some posts on the Chicago forum. I'm not going to go back and re-do them systematically, but I'll quote the relevant posts below (with some editing to combine multiple posts and to avoid the need to include responses):</p>
<p>
[quote]
Why is Chicago's yield so low? The answer is, it isn't. If you factor out the effect of early decision programs (which produce 100% yield on a portion of the pool), many other elite institutions have comparable yields. Swarthmore gets 30% of its RD acceptees, Williams 36%, Brown 44%, Dartmouth 38%, Cornell 37%. To some extent, all of these institutions are chasing the same students, and only a small handful "win" more head-to-head contests than they lose. They all lose accepted students to each other, to less expensive schools, and of course to the schools like Harvard and Yale whose yields are 70%+.</p>
<p>Here's a fun application of the analysis: Chicago vs. Northwestern</p>
<p>Each gets about the same number of applications per slot: 8.3. So number of applications doesn't affect their relative numbers at all.</p>
<p>Northwestern's gross numbers show an overall acceptance rate of 30% (4,820 out of 16,220 apps) vs. Chicago's 35% (3,600 out of 10,400 apps). Northwestern's overall yield is 40.6% (1,950 out of 4,800), while Chicago has an overall yield of 34.7% (1,250 out of 3,600). So Northwestern looks a little more selective, and a little more popular with admittees, notwithstanding that Eastern snobs like me don't consider it as being anywhere near as attractive as Chicago. (I'm sure no one at Chicago has ever noticed this, or speculated as to why that might be.)</p>
<p>Northwestern, however, takes a little more than a quarter of its class ED from a very small number of ED applications, at a 49% acceptance rate (524 acceptances, 1,079 applications), on which it gets 100% yield. That leaves an RD pool of about 15,150 apps, with 4,300 acceptances, a 28.4% acceptance rate. Out of those 4,300 accepted students, 1,430 chose to attend -- almost exactly 33.3% yield.</p>
<p>Chicago gets a lot higher percentage of its applications EA -- about 25%, or 2,600 EA apps. Last year, it accepted about 1,150 of those, 44%, but of course they were not committed to attend Chicago. If I assume that about 45% of the EA pool gets deferred, Chicago's RD pool would have been about 9,000, of which 2,450 were accepted -- 27.2%. And, as noted, Chicago's yield on all accepted students was 34.7%.</p>
<p>So, it turns out that the apparent difference between Chicago and Northwestern is pretty illusory, and to the extent there is a (slight) difference it goes the other way. Northwestern accepts a (slightly) higher percentage of its early applications, and a (very slightly) higher percentage of its RD applications. Its yield among students who have a choice is slightly lower. The difference between the ED/EA programs at the schools accounts for 100%+ of their apparent differences in acceptance rate and yield.</p>
<p>. . . . </p>
<p>(Here's a flaw in the analysis, in the interest of full disclosure: I was using 2006 numbers for Northwestern and 2007 numbers for Chicago, in part because they were the latest I had for both, but in part also because by coincidence that meant both schools got almost exactly the same number of applications per slot, so it took the "self-selecting applicants" issue out of the analysis. If I had used 2006 Chicago numbers, there were almost 1,000 fewer applications, so Northwestern would have been more selective in any event. And for all I know Northwestern had 17,000 or 18,000 applications in 2007, or accepted only 4,500 kids to fill its class.</p>
<p>I don't think one could really support the position that Chicago is any more selective than Northwestern. I do think that one can support the proposition that the differences in the schools' selectivity metrics is in large part a function of Northwestern's ED program design.)
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I have never considered yeild as anything more than an admissions beauty contest which reinforce stereotypes whether they are valid ones or not. Does HYP's high yeilds mean that they are clearly superior educational institutions to Chicago because of the differences in admissions yeilds? Many, if not most, would reject that conclusion. Okay, then how about HYP vs Oberlin or Northwestern cited in the above article? I suspect fewer people would reject that notion and probably a larger percentage of people from the midwest would reject the notion.</p>
<p>So if yeild is based primarily on perception which is itself based on incomplete data how is it different than decisions made by beauty pagent judges?</p>
<p>"Likewise, yield for private school acceptees was greater than for public schoolers: 46.9% versus 37.7%. probably a link between those stats as its usually the private schools that don't rank."</p>
<p>A link, but probably not causal. I suspect what accounts for the difference is that private school admittees are more likely to come from families willing to pay extra for educational prestige. Moreover the fact that they come from private schools is a de facto signal of this to the colleges they are considering. The increased likelihood of financial commitment on the part of private high school graduates is a factor that cannot help but creep into even "need blind" selection processes.</p>
<p>Adding to Descartesz' point, in my experience private school students are far more likely to use ED than public school students. At the private school I know best, about half the class is ACCEPTED ED or SCEA (and far more than half applies). At my kids' public school, maybe 5% of the class applied anywhere ED, and acceptances were under 2%. So if the ED factor isn't backed out of yield for the Amherst numbers, I suspect it would account for most, if not all, of any private-public difference at Amherst. (Maybe more than all, since I think the private school kids tend to apply to more colleges in the RD round, and tend to have more choices in April.)</p>
<p>Very few publics even have ED. UVa dropped it last year.</p>
<p>Anecdotally, private school GC's spend more time on the phone between November and March with adcom's than public school GC's do.</p>
<p>They may not say outright, "if you admit this kid he will attend" but they apparently wander pretty close, i.e. "despite being a double legacy at Dartmouth, Harry fell in love with the urban environment at Columbia and is very interested in joining the Blues Brothers jazz combo". I think this means that adcom's can end up with a higher yielding group from a private school cohort than a public school-- they've been tipped off when the school is a kid's first choice and they may assume that if there's no lobbying effort on behalf of a particular kid that in fact, the school is the kids safety or last choice.</p>
<p>Just an opinion... based on local rumor and innuendo!</p>
<p>I looked at the Amherst data linked above (very interesting). Overall acceptances for applicants from public vs. private schools are about 2.2:1. If one posits that ED acceptances are more in a ratio of 1:1, there would be no meaningful difference in yield for students accepted RD in the two groups. It would also cut in half the apparent difference in acceptance rate for applicants from the two groups</p>
<p>Brown provides the same types of data for the class of 2011 as Papa Chicken cites for Amherst in post #17. <a href="http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Admission/gettoknowus/factsandfigures.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Admission/gettoknowus/factsandfigures.html</a></p>
<p>Similar results:</p>
<p>SAT CR</p>
<p>Range Yield</p>
<pre><code> 800 44%
</code></pre>
<p>750-790 49.6%
700-740 54.4%
650-690 60%
600-640 66%
550-590 73.7%
<500 78.7%</p>
<p>Sort of off topic, but the Brown data contain other tidbits:</p>
<p>15% of the class had an 800 in CR; 13.6% an 800 in Math.</p>
<p>The acceptance rate with an 800 in CR was 29.2%; with a 750-790, 19.7%. (For Math, it was 27.5% and 20.7%.) And you wonder why you read posts saying "Well, I got a 770, should I retake?"</p>
<p>Brown doesn't post data for combined SAT I scores. But what do the data say about the "lopsided" kid. That is, which is "better": </p>
<p>800CR - admit rate 29.2%
670M - admit rate 10.3%</p>
<p>or </p>
<p>740CR - admit rate 15.8%
730M - admit rate 15.7%</p>
<p>(Yeah, yeah, 800CR, 770M beats 'em both.)</p>
<p>
[quote]
...for freshmen at Rochester and Fordham and American University. These are great schools, but of the kids that are accepted, only 17-20% enroll.
[/quote]
Few posters are saying anything about $. If well endowed schools are also nicely $ packaging a greater % of accepted students, wouldn't that also affect the yield?</p>
<p>My only experience with this was American, accepted but with only around 43-46% of need met (College Board site lists Average percent of need met: 54%)</p>
<p>Perchance these low-yield but good schools may be accepting bigger volumes of students hoping some of the lesser ranked will be able to foot the whole bill....to replace the higher ranked kids they lose due to better package offers elsewhere. </p>
<p>(Of course this has nothing to do with the ED...1st choice by a long shot-kind of applicants :-))</p>
<p>I am very surprised that schools like Duke and Cornell, ranked so high by USNWR in its rankings of national universities, have such low yields. Quite disappointing actually. </p>
<p>I mean if someone was to give up an acceptance from Duke or Cornell, they must have been accepted to somewhere that was probably better, in terms of prestige, aid, and everything else. Interesting...</p>
<p>And why isn't NYU higher on this list. Doesn't make much sense to me.</p>
<p>What do you mean "such low yields"? Only a tiny handful of schools have yields that high.</p>
<p>In point of fact, among the private universities that compete nationally for top students (including Duke and Cornell), if you strip out the effect of Early Decision programs (which produce 100% yield for 25-50% of the class), there are probably only six or seven with yields higher than 40% on their uncommitted acceptees (HYPS, MIT, and Brown, maybe Columbia, as far as I know). Most of the others are in the mid-30s. That makes sense. They accept strong students, the students put in multiple applications and usually wind up with several options, and the colleges are all basically substitutes for one another. Five perfectly rational students could choose five different colleges from the same list of options. So it's going to be really hard for more than a few colleges to pull in half or more of their uncommitted acceptees.</p>
<p>And NYU is even less a mystery. It has a huge class to fill, its cost is noticeably higher than its competition, and its financial aid often weaker.</p>
<p>Don't forget Notre Dame, which has no ED, yet consistently manages one of the nation's highest yields.</p>
<p>Notre Dame is a school like UF in terms of loyalty. Kids grow up around here dreaming of being a gator. Lots of kids used to apply ED (in the old days when they had it), even though their stats would easily get them in RD. They knew where they wanted to go, didn't want to go anywhere else, and wanted the paper in hand so they didn't have to fill out more applications. I'd say as many as 50% of my elementary male students come to lessons with UF shirts on. It starts when they're young. It's like a CULT!</p>
<p>But a GOOD cult!</p>
<p>Not to be thick, but why should I care about yields? I suppose it will help me decide my son's chances to get in a college, but I don't get the big deal.</p>
<p>I don't necessarily think you have to be obsessed with yield, but a high yield would indicate that most of the students attending had the college as their top choice. So they'd be likely to be more enthused, more aware of what awaits them, more likely to be a good fit. I think that the first weeks on campus would be more upbeat, as fewer kids would be still recovering from disappointment over dream school rejections. But it certainly wouldn't be on my top ten list for school choice criterion.</p>