I received some stats about the class of 2019 from UNC alum association. It said of the students accepted this year they expected 42% enrollment. That sounded low to me.
That is pretty high. UC Berkley is 39.8%. John Hopkin 37.4%
That number is known as “yield” and that is a decent percentage I suppose, although yield doesn’t really mean much as a stat any more in terms of comparing school quality. The University of Nebraska has about the same yield many years as Harvard. High quality schools like UNC and UC Berkeley, as well as privates like Duke and Johns Hopkins, get a lot of applications from the same students, more so than ever before. In this age of the Common Application and online submissions, students often apply to 12, 15, even 20 schools instead of the 4-5 of the old days. But there are exceptions at both extremes. Harvard and Yale have very high yields because they are considered the best of the best by most people. Nebraska, U of Alaska, etc. tend to only get applications from locals that have zero plans on going elsewhere, for cost and other reasons. Some state schools attract a lot of out of state applicants because they are so good, and additionally these OOS applicants are also applying to top private schools. Cost is often not the main issue. UNC, UVA, Michigan, UCLA and UCB tend to lead this kind of list. Therefore their yield will be lower than many other state schools.
Thank you both, that makes sense.