Has anyone seen with the yield is for the class of 2021?
It looks as though Stanford won’t publish yield. I hope it refuses. That metric has done a serious disservice to students applying to college.
bicoastalusa writes:
“It looks as though Stanford won’t publish yield. I hope it refuses. That metric has done a serious disservice to students applying to college.”
I thought that universities are based on the power of facts and truth. Why make an opaque process even more opaque? I think a college’s yield can be valuable information, obviously in conjunction with other information. If you think yield data is totally misleading, people can simply ignore it.
You wouldn’t say this if your child were rejected from every college. I know a few cases where that has happened. Safety schools realize they’re safety, and are likely to reject an applicant because they don’t want to negatively affect yield by admitting students who won’t matriculate. Unlike admit rates which serve a useful purpose, yield is primarily a marketing ploy. It hurts applicants severely by forcing them to apply to many more schools to avoid having nowhere to go in the fall.
Last year, they released the applicants’ profile before July 25. This year’s yield can be calculated once the current profile is released.
I dont think Stanford is being opaque. It is just that it is not making a huge deal about it. When it releases the incoming class profile it will be easy to calculate the yield but it it not making any huge announcements before that which is good imo. Also many top schools have yet to release their yields.
Posters are correct: The yield rate as well as the admit rate will eventually come out. It is required (I think by law, but I am not sure) in the Common Data Set.
I agree with bicoastalusa that schools play games–not only with the yield rate but also the admit rate. Some schools will not admit a candidate because the candidate seems too strong and is likely to go elsewhere. Why admit a kid you will almost surely lose: it will hurt both your admit rate and yield rate. And those are two things admissions officials are apparently judged on.
The problem is that if schools stopped publishing yield rates, as bicoastalusa wants, you still have the incentive effects of the admit rate. If you don’t publish yield rates (which I don’t think anyone is proposing), then admissions officials are largely unmonitored. Prospective applicants would also be denied valuable information about their prospects. I agree there is a problem, but I’m not sure that suppressing information will help or hurt.
My proposal would be to make all information, and I mean all information, public. Each and every application file with the candidate’s name, recommendations (with names), etc. That way prospective students could get a much better feel if they are a viable candidate. Schools would have far fewer incentives to play games. Of course, such a proposal will never be implemented in the U.S. (Something close to this policy can be found in some of the Nordic countries, however.) Among other reasons, do you think politicians or very large donors want the public to know how much of a break their kids receive in the admissions process?
As much as I would love to see what a school wrote on my application and see what recommendations had to say etc, I think the above proposal to make all of that information public is a rather ludicrous one. What a huge liability and breech of privacy. FERPA would never allow it, anyway.
As for yield, could someone explain why that’s valuable information to a candidate? Say you get into Harvard and Yale, one with 82% yield and the other with 70% yield, are you likely to choose Harvard just because more candidates gravitated toward the most irresistible brand name in US Colleges and thus made it look more desirable somehow? I don’t see why candidates would get use out of that metric in their decision process, though I agree it should be made public.
The reason for transparency is first to cut down on cryonmism and second to provide better information to applicants on whether they should apply. You might call this proposal "ludicrous " but it is essentially the policy in Nordic countries. And it extends far beyond college admissions. For instance, data on hospital stays, in particular who and how long, is publicly available in Denmark.
Of course you are correct that US law would have to change and that’s not going to happen.
@Senior2016M Yield offers somewhat valuable information because it shows which schools are the most desirable. There is a reason Harvard and Stanford have yields well over 80% while Yale and Princeton have yields <= 70%. Just to use your example, most people who get into both Harvard and Yale choose to go to Harvard, and also people are much more likely to turn down Yale for another ivy/top school than they are to turn down Harvard for another school.
Yield can be used as a proxy for the perceived strength of the school and the attractiveness of its brand.
@Penn95 Thanks for that answer - I do understand that component of the argument, but I guess I just don’t see that as helpful to an applicant. I see it as profoundly harmful to the system as a whole. Why should a student, when considering Harvard vs Yale (or even Williams vs Harvard or JHU vs. Georgetown or whatever decision) take into consideration the fact that more people perceive Harvard as more desirable than Yale? Why should they see Williams’ sub-50% yield and say “Oh, well I should go to Yale because that’s where the majority of cross-admits are heading.” Yale has a far better undergraduate education than Harvard. Williams has a better undergraduate education than any of the Ivies. Is this not a negative influence, then? The fact that people are choosing based on a brand name and not on what the school can offer them in conjunction with their academic aspirations and personal goals? I think it’s an enormous pity.
I think the fact that people feel pressured to choose Harvard for its brand rather than going to a school that is best for them (which may or may not be Harvard) is not actually a good thing. So while I believe that yield should be published, I don’t think it should be made available purportedly for the sake of an applicant’s alleged benefit, because I don’t see that pressure to choose the more prestigious school to be a beneficial force in the college decision process.
@fredthered I am aware of that in certain countries, and I see the reasons, but I take issue with the name association with applications. FERPA aside, I do see a potential use for the transparency and publishing individual application info, but the connection of that with someone’s name and personal identifiers, then tied to a test score and GPA, is rather problematic. It would reveal some home truths about the enormous issues with the current system and its inherent unfairness to particular groups, no doubt, and perhaps some sunlight is what admissions needs. But not at the expense of an individual’s right to privacy as a college applicant, I don’t think.
I think reasonable people can disagree. My major issue is with the laws that prohibit disclosure. I would repeal these laws and let colleges choose their own policies. College A might say that they disclose everything. College B might keep everything confidential. College C might disclose some information. Etc. Applicicants would choose to apply or not based on a school’s policy.
Of course, this will never happen. Laws seldom are repealed in this country, and we certainly are reluctant to let individuals make their own choices.
@Senior2016M I get what you are saying but I don’t think people choose purely on some intangible notion of prestige. Yes a big part of it is pure prestige, which i agree is not helpful, but prestige is derived to a degree from actual superiority/strength of the school in certain fields. For example, saying Williams has a better undergraduate education than all of the ivies is very open to interpretation depending on the needs, wants and personality of the student. For example at Williams one would not have access to the research opportunities, variety of classes, and ECs available at many ivies, and one could find the relative lack of variety in terms of classes, research, activities rather anemic and stifling. Of course another person might just love the individual attention afforded at a place like Williams. Another example, a tippy top economics or pre-med student at Harvard would have the ability to work/do research with the very very top people in the field, access which she would not be afforded even at a place like Yale.
Stanford class of 2021:
Apps: 44073
Admits: 2085
Enrolled: 1708
Admit rate=2085/4473=4.7%
Yield rate=1708/2085=81.9%
Yield/Admit=17.4
It looks like that they accepted 35 students from the waitlist.
No early admission info!
It appears that the admissions office has released significantly less information than in prior years. Just click on any of the profiles for a prior year. Perhaps more information will be released in coming weeks, including data on early admission. If not, then Stanford might be one of the most opaque universities when it comes to admission.
Given that things happen at the last minute (illness and injury included), and Stanford doesn’t start until later in September, I don’t know that any numbers are completely final. I would want to do the data dump exactly once, and after every last bit of dust had settled. Having multiple versions out there doesn’t help anyone. At that point, whether they were sufficiently transparent will be known.
Thank you @ewho!
The early admission info was not shown for any of previous classes (in this format), neither on CDS.
So, in the next two or so months, about 7000~8000 seniors will apply to Stanford without knowing anything about REA for the class before.
I can understand that they want to tone down the admission fever, but this is unhealthy too.