<p>Yes. But note that the Duke yield rate today is no higher than it was then - particularly relative to the top elites. And see THIS recent article as well:</p>
<p>"Based on acceptance rates, Duke continues to fall behind a few choice schools in terms of selectivity. Against five of those schools in particular, Duke faces substantial recruiting obstacles. According to matriculation data, Duke is successful in wooing to campus only about 15 percent of those admitted students who are also accepted to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, or Stanford. Against the next group--Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, and Penn--Duke does better, enrolling about 50 percent....</p>
<p>Those percentages, Lange and Guttentag say, have not changed much over the years. Guttentag explains that although some of the numbers against individual competitors vary year to year, it is tough to make significant progress because the rest of the schools are all getting better, too. "There are few schools," he says, "that recruit more aggressively than Harvard..."</p>
<p>Whether more are taken off the waitlist at "stage 2" or "stage 3" depends on waitlist action elsewhere which may eventually impact Duke, and on the phenomenon known as "summer melt."</p>
<p>So the ED admits (470 of them) didn't include any of the top 300? Or do you think the claim related to the RD admits only? It seems that the overall RD yield rate was about 34%. Does this imply that the yield rate for the "top 300" was lower than that? At most schools, the yield rate rises as the SAT scores of admits drop.</p>