Does anyone know the admittance rate at Hamilton this year? Was shocked to see Colbys at 13%.
The significant increase in applications may be attributed to…
http://www.colby.edu/news/2018/03/23/demand-for-colby-rises-among-high-achieving-students/
An even bigger factor may be that Colby did away with the application fee this year after eliminating the supplement a few years earlier. That means that an applicant can add it to their list by checking a box on the CA without any additional work. If you go to the Colby threads you’ll find plenty of posts by kids saying things like, “I didn’t know Colby existed but someone told me it was free so I added it at the last minute and now I’m seriously considering it.”
Colby was up 125% over the past 4 years - which is phenomenal. They’ve done a great job of marketing. Their Instagram is super on point, as is the rest of their marketing. They really seem to know how to speak to the student (and parents) they want to attract. Honestly, I wish Hamilton was savvier in this regard.
I think the no tuition under 60k is a great initiative. However, our counselor says that they are a very need aware school, and not just for the borderline applicants. They are in fundraising mode and growing their endowment is a priority. If you need substantial aid you need to check one of their boxes such as URM, location, sport etc - so there are probably a lot of disappointed applicants pulled in by that offer who did not check those boxes.
I wonder about this arms race to boosting applicants. It’s great to widen the net and get kids who would have otherwise not applied. But at what cost - do they massively staff up seasonally to read the apps with the same care as when they received less? Or does it get more metrics oriented?
I kind of feel LAC’s are at a tipping point; if you don’t match the other schools and up your apps then you seem less competitive. I’m guessing that next year some kids will say Colby is as hard to get into as Amherst or Midd, and harder than Vassar, Hamilton, and Wesleyan, etc.
Well, what about yield? In a competitive climate, quality yields begin at ~30%. This figure for various colleges won’t be known until later, but at schools with huge increases of casual applications, yield may fall somewhere below a solid threshold.
@merc81 Interesting that you should bring yield in this discussion. In our Info session at Colby someone asked what their yield is and the person giving the session said they did not have that number. My guess is they did but preferred not to say. If they didn’t know that statistic it just goes to show how little they value that metric, and how few times they have been asked to answer that question.
I think that most people - especially the students - don’t factor in yield. I can rank the schools my D applied to by admit rate from memory with a high degree of confidence. I don’t think I could do it by yield. Actually, I could not even cite the yield of more than one or two schools D applied to!
In addition, even very transparent schools like Hamilton do not show the yield on their site (or do not do the math, which for math-challenged people like me means the numbers shown are fairly meaningless). And then there are schools like Williams, which has a low yield relative to its peers - but few would use that as a measure of its quality.
Unfortunately, acceptance rate and scores are the accepted shorthand way to gauge a school right now.
@junior: If you’re not interested in the math/conversions, you can nonetheless compare the raw acceptances. Using my year-old U.S. News, the reported acceptances for Hamilton totaled 1348, while Colby accepted 1710 applicants to fill a similarly-sized class.
In general, I wouldn’t exactly compare schools by yield. Nonetheless, for substantive reasons, colleges do need a decent yield in order to enroll the class on which they’d intended.
I believe the application fee was eliminated 10+ years ago.
Nonetheless, the application fee has been nonexistent since 2014.
@merc81 It’s not laziness and not wanting to do the math, it’s just that it is not intuitive to me. If my dad were to look at the figures on Hamiton site he would seamlessly know the yield percent without doing any active effort, his brain just works that way. No slight was intended to Hamilton in my comment, it was (I thought) a self effacing admittance of inability to ‘read’ numbers. Your illustration of the raw admit numbers is quite clear to me though!
In terms of that specific comparative yield, I can only speak to how it works at D’s school. Given acceptance at both schools, the majority of students at her school would currently matriculate to Hamilton. They often do so because Hamilton is considered a ‘better’ admit - based on looking at Naviance and seeing that more students are admitted to Colby than Hamilton (given similar stats). If Colby’s admit rate continues to be at 13% (vs 20%+ for Hamilton) then that perception will shift and the matriculation will be more balanced and the yield will shift. It seems to me that yield follows acceptance rate with a few years lag, yes?
@Stacyisms I think that the trifecta of no fee / no essay / no loans is a huge motivator, and I think Colby’s numbers are now snowballing with momentum. But mostly I think its that they have a clear, consistent and appealing message and they know how to deliver it.
The fact that Colby has literally twice as many applicants as Hamilton to fill the same class size is somewhat astounding.
@4junior: I’m a libertarian with respect to how you approach math (and find your self-effacing comments with respect to the topic humorous). I’d thought you might find an alternative approach interesting though, and hope that you did.
In terms of acceptance rates, I regard them similarly to yield rates. Colleges benefit from an acceptance rate that allows them to enroll a class of accomplished, sincerely motivated students. For this, ~30% might suffice. Schools that market themselves to arrive at figures far below this level, if marketing with such intent does occur, would seem to be operating more as conventional businesses than as educational institutions. However, if a school can maintain its essential standards while nonetheless arriving at a low acceptance rate organically, then that might be a measure of a successful institution.
@4junor. The supplemental essay was estimated in 2011.
That and the fact that Colby is now equated with prestigious colleges such as Vassar, Smith and Harvey Mudd in the *US News *ranking.
How much effect do you believe eliminating the essay had on increasing applications?
The University of Chicago requires the infamous essays but still has significantly increased applications.