Nope. The school has a cohort of maybe 50 students, about the top 15-20%, who know each other well, have been in all honors and AP classes all the way through high school. None of them got into this school; in fact, other than my kid, who had a very big spike, no one is getting in anywhere highly competitive. Best I’ve heard of is a T50 school. Most of these kids have high GPAs, high test scores (SAT and ACT testing opened up here in September/October), strong extracurriculars. Five are national merit finalists, probably at least half of them were commended, if not all of them.
Unless they all clean up on Ivies, it’s going to have been a dismal year. The only explanation for that kid, would be “Tufts syndrome”.
Well, our flagship state honors program is going to be like a little Ivy in and of itself! I am sure they all applied to it, as a safety, and it most certainly does NOT engage in yield protection. Good thing they all like each other - they’re gonna mostly be together for another 4 yrs there, I think.
Are you at a public school? I’m curious to hear how things went this year. I’ve got a junior but have a few friends with seniors and its been a mixed bag (we’re in MA) -a fair number of admits to RPI, WPI, RIT, UVM and, of course, UMass Honors but not a ton of top 50 (though my son does have a friend who got into Columbia ED) - the kids we know are all STEM types so I don’t know how kids with other areas of focus did.
No matter how well you think you know a student, you don’t know what is in their application, how their essays were written, what the GC wrote, etc… Plus, did this student need financial aid? Was the school he wanted TO or test blind this year and the 1600 not consider and the rest of the application didn’t stack up as well?
The year my D graduated, her friend was Val with perfect GPA and scores (not near perfect, perfect), tons of great ECs, research experience, etc. still has WLs and rejections. That’s kind of par for the course for reach schools and even T50s if you are applying to a competitive major.
Remember that every single high school in the country has a val and sal. They are all gunning for the same selective schools. There isn’t room for all of them. There just isn’t. Colleges want to balance their class - gender, location, major, ECs, finances, etc… all play a role in how they choose their class.
IMO, it’s not healthy to fixate on “explanations.” Being rejected from college isn’t personal and says nothing about a student’s ability to be successful somewhere else. I’m sure these student will shine in their state’s honors program if that is where they will land. As you noted, those honors programs are populated with extremely bright students.
Yes, a really good suburban public school, the only truly integrated one (racially, socioeconomically) in the region. Offers all the APs imaginable, just about. Very strong extracurricular programs. My kid did fine, great, in fact - because of a huge extracurricular spike, on top of solid stats. But his friends, who are mostly more than his equal, are getting hosed. I feel so bad for them - these are the kids who grew up playing in my basement and my backyard, all of them really smart, really high-achieving. When I heard about this kid who is tops in everything, getting rejected by this T30 school, I couldn’t believe it… until I heard about Tufts syndrome. It’s the only explanation, and I knew nothing about yield protection, until last night.
Some colleges have more than their shares of applicants who use them as backups. The larger number of such applicants causes greater uncertainty and fluctuation in yield prediction. Trying to identify such applicants and limiting their impact on enrollment is always part of the game.
Not all colleges care, or can care, about yield. Those with auto admit programs are in that group. However, almost no selective college wants to be another college’s backup, or worse, a “safety”.
Our urban school has 20+ NMF and twice as many commended students and a strong history of placing students at competitive colleges. With Ivy Day looming, the number of waitlist decisions versus acceptances is far beyond normal. The school’s Naviance stats bear that out. Anecdotally, those who applied binding ED are seeing better outcomes. This supports the “expressed interest” theory or, to me, a “cost irrelevant” bias. This year the colleges anticipated increased applications and potential lower yields. Yield gets protected by taking committed ED. If your profile was admitted ED, your RD chances are lower and you end up on the waitlist.
I am thinking that schools will likely break 2 ways. The very selective ones, especially those with a large body of admitted 2024’s who deferred a year, will admit fewer than in prior years in case yield stays the same or goes up to protect against too many students matriculating and make use of a larger waitlist to round out the class. The less selective ones may admit more than historical because they likely are anticipating yield will go down, and they need the bodies to make budget.
That is too bad. I’ve heard, anecdotally, that it is really tough this year. A lot more kids waitlisted or rejected than normal. At the same time, some of the threads on CC show the same kids getting into almost all their (highly selective) schools, but at the end of the day they can only attend one so maybe there will be a lot of WL movement this year.
Maybe this was a school that didn’t weigh the URM component as highly as other schools may have? Because, the rest of those things are pretty common with T30 applications. My own kid has all the same stuff (4.0 uw, 1580 sat, regional awards, great ec’s, etc) and for him it’s been a mixed bag. He has acceptances from two top 6 engineering programs, but also two rejections at top 6 engineering programs. He also got weight listed at a top 20 engineering program.
I guess my point is that for most kids with high stats, no T30 is a sure thing. There are just too many kids with similar great applications.
For schools that have more qualified applicants than they have open seats in a class, maximizing yield is a benefit in and of itself whether or not it has the ancillary benefit of perceived prestige, and I am not aware of any major ranking that includes yield percentage as a variable. The higher the yield, the shorter, more efficient and less expensive the admissions process…fewer applications to read, fewer admits to extend, fewer staff necessary, reductions in marketing, faster result turnaround to applicants, more accurate forecasting, reduced likelihood of over enrollment, on and on.
For this subset of selective schools, are there alternatives to trying to drive yield as high as possible? I suppose the schools could offer one application option where all results are given at the same time. That way they could admit all applicants deemed qualified and then have a first come, first served race to fill all of the seats in the class. Once the available seats are claimed by the fastest acting qualified applicants, the rest are simply out of luck. It would naturally weed out those who are not truly interested and have only applied as a back up or less preferred alternative, and maximize the chances of those who have prioritized the school as top choice. That would surely be a better option for the schools, but for the applicants?
When you look at the schools with the highest yield percentages, they are not surprisingly the schools most in demand…and also among those that fill the highest percentage of their classes via ED. So that is another option to maximize yield and largely beneficial to the institution, but again problematic for the majority of applicants.
So instead of simply doing what is best for the school itself, they take on a complicated and expensive process to provide greater accessibility to a larger group of applicants. If during years of undergoing that process they have come up with data-driven ways to identify qualified applicants who are more likely and less likely to enroll, why would they not use those learnings to their advantage? Admissions is all about data, and if institutions aren’t using the data from each cycle to learn about what it should be doing for future cycles, shame on them for wasting the opportunity to get better at their mission.
I, for one, do not see “yield protection” as a pejorative term. I see it as something to strive for within an effective admissions organization.
Would not be surprised if many of the schools use proprietary AI or consultants that use AI to sort through this. There was an article about Trinity (?) doing this in the context of also shaping the class for budgetary reasons, balancing the desire for diversity with hardcore decisions on FA students vs full pay. What will be interesting is how they account for the significant increase in applicants to their school with the total pool of applicants relatively flat.
I’m not sure that’s accurate, at least for the Ivies, Stanford, MIT. They’ve received record numbers of applications, and I’d like to believe they read them all. They’re the last to announce their admits both ED and RD and all schools market.
One more anecdotal observation from my S21’s application journey. He applied to Northeastern, which is rumored to heavily yield protect. We were fortunate to take an official tour of the school before covid hit. This was, in fact, his second tour of NU as he had also toured the school with my older child a few years prior when she was going through the college process. My son liked the college enough to apply early.
We were a little surprised when he was deferred EA. In talking to some folks on the NU thread, we were informed that because my S21 had very high stats, NU was probably assuming he was using them as a safety. We were also told he probably hadn’t demonstrated enough interest. (I guess two tours doesn’t cut it)
Anyway, my son wrote a lovely and detailed letter of continued interest and low and behold he was accepted RD into the honors program with almost their highest merit award.
If I had to guess, I’d say yield protection was perhaps at play in the early round. But, I guess we will never know…
Public universities in Arizona, Iowa, Texas, and other states both have auto-admit criteria and are selective (meaning that they do not admit all applicants). Presumably, they realize that they are some students’ safeties. To the extent that some such “overqualified” students actually do attend, they help improve the student profile of the school, which some schools may value more than a higher yield rate.
Large number of gap year students appears to have had an impact on acceptances at Williams.
“The lower number of students accepted may be due to the approximately 130 students who were originally members of the Class of 2024 but chose to take a gap year instead in light of the pandemic, most of whom will now be members of the Class of 2025.” College acceptance rate lowers to 8 percent for Class of 2025 – The Williams Record