<p>I have been researching several colleges using their Common Data Set data. I am a bit unclear on how much weight to give the college's admit rate (%) and enroll rate (%) in helping me select a shirt list of good institutions. </p>
<p>Example: College X has an admit rate of 20% (2000 students) and an enroll rate of 50% (1000 students)</p>
<p>Question 1) Does college X set a goal to enroll 1000 students in order to maintain or increase its selectivity (admit rate of 20%) or is 1000 freshman all they have room for to maintain a desired facility to student ratio? </p>
<p>Question 2) How significant is the enroll rate and what does it tell me?</p>
<p>1) Unless a school is making an effort to expand their class size, they want to admit about the name number of students a year. There are myriad reasons for this: available housing, class sizes, food, etc. Space is really the biggest issue, and it causes a lot of problems when more students accept an offer of admission than was expected. (Two years ago, Hopkins accepted about 100/200 too many students and had to house their kids in local B&B’s–maybe they bought up those properties, I can’t remember.)</p>
<p>2) The enroll rate, or yield, is how many accepted students accept an offer of admission. For Harvard, that rate hovers between 75-80%, but very, very few other colleges even come close to that, with some of the most selective having yields between 30/40-60%. The reason is that acceptees to one top school are likely to be accepted to other top schools as well. I wouldn’t read too much into the yield unless it’s woefully low.</p>