<p>Black Student Yield: Harvard Regains the Lead</p>
<p>So-called yield, the percentage of applicants who decide to go to a college that issues an invitation to them, has become the standard measure of an institution’s strength and drawing power. For most of the past 20 years Harvard University has been the nation’s gold standard in student yield percentage for both black and white students. But in both 2002 and 2003 this gold standard in student yield moved to Stanford University. In 2003 the black student yield at Stanford was 67.9 percent, the highest in the country. In 2005 and again this year, Harvard University posts the highest black student yield. Among the 24 universities that disclosed black student yield statistics to JBHE this year, Harvard had the highest rate at 70.9 percent. MIT had a large jump in black student yield from 47.8 percent in 2005 to 66.4 percent this year. This was the second-highest yield rate next to Harvard’s. Stanford’s black student yield has dropped to 61.4 percent, which is third in our rankings.</p>
<p>Among the top-ranking universities, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Notre Dame were the only other schools to produce a black student yield of over 50 percent. </p>
<p>(A Chart shows black admissions data for many of the top elites and leading state universities.)</p>
<p><a href="http://www.jbhe.com/preview/autumn06preview.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.jbhe.com/preview/autumn06preview.html</a></p>
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<p>Among the top-ranking universities, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Notre Dame were the only other schools to produce a black student yield of over 50 percent. </p>
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<p>i was surprised to read this until i looked closer and saw that princeton, yale, columbia, and dartmouth all declined to release their yield numbers to JBHE. interestingly, even harvard - which released its own impressive yield - declined to release its acceptance rate, for fear of backlash.</p>
<p>This number doesn't really mean much. All it's saying is that most black students who get accepted to Harvard end up coming. The same could be said for pretty much any other ethnic group. What they really need to show is the overall yield, which is probably going to be around 75-80 percent for Harvard, and contrast it to the black yield.</p>
<p>Of course none of those schools has an overall yield rate that high, let alone for black admits, and Dartmouth's overall yield rate is not quite 50%. Harvard's overall yield rate for the Class of 2010 was 79.3%</p>
<p>well, i wasn't suggesting that those schools (PYCD) would have higher yields for black admits than harvard (surely not), only that several of them would be in the 50% group with HSM, penn, notre dame, and UNC. by the way, what a jump for MIT - from 48% to 66% in just one year!</p>
<p>For whatever reason, Harvard DID disclose some of these numbers to JBHE for the Class of 2008. (See issue 47)</p>
<p>Total Applicants - 19,752
Total Accepted - 2,110
Overall Student Acceptance Rate - 10.7%
Black Applicants - 1,263
Blacks Accepted - 211
Black Acceptance Rate - 16.7%
Black Enrollees - 145
Black Student Yield - 68.7%
Black % of First-Year Class - 8.9%</p>