<p>However, the assumption that a student who applies is not interested unless s/he plays the “interest” game may be misguided. After all, merely applying to a school is a demonstration of “interest”*. Back when I was in high school applying to colleges, I would have been fine attending the least selective school on my list, even though I had done nothing with that school that would today be part of the “interest” game.</p>
<p>*Even those who do “shotgun” applications to lots of California public universities tend to have some preferences which are reflected in the schools that choose to apply and not apply to.</p>
<p>“how could a college ever predict with any accuracy whether it will be THE school chosen by a particular student”</p>
<p>They can’t know for sure about any individual, but they can know the odds. Admissions stats, gender, race, geography, track record at that high school, financial status…they know which students in their applicant pool are 80% likely to enroll if admitted, and which are 20% likely. They would be in big, big trouble if they didn’t know that.</p>
<p>The colleges have probably studied what makes an admitted student more or less likely to matriculate, and expressed interest may be associated with a higher rate of matriculation.</p>
<p>“They can’t know for sure about any individual, but they can know the odds. Admissions stats, gender, race, geography, track record at that high school, financial status…they know which students in their applicant pool are 80% likely to enroll if admitted, and which are 20% likely. They would be in big, big trouble if they didn’t know that.”</p>
<p>It is spooky to think that the schools have access to a crystal ball that tells them what school my D will ultimately choose when she doesn’t know the answer herself!</p>
<p>Remember that the field of “admissions” is also the field of “enrollment management.” It is their job not only to assemble a numerically and qualitatively strong class, but to get the right number of heads into the beds. This is way harder than it looks, even for the Stanfords of the world that get ~75% of overall admits saying yes. Even at HYS, there’s a double-digit yield difference between EA and RD admits. There’s another double-digit difference between the yield on African-American admits vs. white admits (white admits have a much higher yield). Deans can lose their jobs if they get this math wrong.</p>
<p>I get how important accurate yield management is, but I always figured that if a school wants someone, as long as the student has adequately expressed interest, the school would accept that student and presume a yield likelihood based on historical average. Also, this makes me wonder how to deal with supplemental applications that request info about what other schools the student is applying to – even if the applicant is careful and just lists three other similarly ranked schools, if school x may pre-emptively waitlist an applicant on the basis that two-thirds of kids who get into school y also will choose it over school x, that is bad for the kid who might really prefer school x. And bad for school x.</p>
<p>Note that all schools need to predict yield based on characteristics of admitted students in order to admit the correct number of students to fill the spaces in the incoming class, but only some schools are actively trying to raise their overall yield rates though “level of applicant’s interest” games. (E.g. the admit-by-formula schools obviously do not do the latter, even though they do the former in setting the threshold based on expected yield of admitted students.)</p>
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<p>Since HYS (and P) have SCEA/REA which precludes the student from applying to potential cross-admit-competitive schools EA or ED, applying SCEA/REA there likely is an expression of “interest” that correlates to a higher yield rate than an RD application (even if it is not a criterion for admission).</p>
<p>Zip codes and trends are considered. If a HS sends a 100 applications to a school, 50% kids are accepted and only 1 % enroll. The college knows they are not hot in that school and the following year they may only offer 20% acceptances. They do care about the yield.</p>
<p>Yes, but I’ll bet (a) the Ivy League applicants are more likely to come from the million-dollar homes than the public housing, (b) when they do get an applicant from the public housing, his or her behavior is more like that of the million-dollar-home kids than, say, some kid from public housing in the Bronx, because of peer influence from the richer kids, and (c) it’s not hard to tell who is who from other information on the application… Anyway, analytics don’t have to be 100% right in every case to be right.</p>
<p>Back in the day (including not so long ago, and maybe still), GCs at the feeder high schools used to be a big help in the yield management department. In the first place, they did a lot to make certain that all of the great students weren’t competing with one another for the same colleges, and that lots of students were taken ED by their first choices, so came off the market altogether. If asked, they would generally give an indication of how likely a student was to enroll if accepted, and they were pretty adept at making their predictions come true if necessary.</p>
<p>As a result, I doubt anyone ever accepted 15 kids per year from Exeter repeatedly only to have few or none of them enroll (unless it was a college where that was par for the course). The college advisers there wouldn’t let it happen.</p>
<p>Exeter enforces enrollment of early applicants, no matter what the college’s rules are. So an Exeter applicant SECA to Harvard if accepted WILL be attending.</p>
<p>There’s also the usual GC management of expectations and telegraphing interest to the colleges. That goes on a lot more when the HS class is smaller and GCs more involve (so more at privates and selective publics).</p>
<p>So far all the Harvard acceptances I can think of come from neither the million dollar homes nor the housing projects, but to be honest the sample size for the former or latter are pretty small. </p>
<p>I actually recently heard an interesting tidbit from another Ivy admissions office that that particular college preferred kids from our school to ones from some of the wealthier zip codes. I am assuming because our kids have been exposed to more diversity than their’s while providing pretty equivalent high school experiences academically.</p>
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