Just skimming here, but want to point out that yield rates for college class of 2025 may be anomalous, as some schools ended up overenrolled, i.e. the yield prediction process may have been challenged by test optional policies… their algorithms were not adjusted sufficiently. I suspect that enrollment management processes will be tweaked for class of 2026.
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Test optional policies may be just one of many COVID-19-related factors that caused yield to be less predictable for many colleges.
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A better metric to consider using might be freshman retention rate. How many who went there were happy enough and financially supported enough to be able to stay?
Medical drop outs (and perhaps Covid now) should be considered, but one would think those numbers should average out among the schools, not be stronger at some than others.
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My top choice school is NYU. My safety is SUNY Albany. I cannot afford to apply ED, so I apply to 8 schools regular decision. I get accepted to all of them, none of the financial aid packages are affordable (and NYU, my “preferred” college is the least affordable of them all) so I go to Albany, my least favorite school.
NYU’s yield tells you nothing in this case vis-a-vis “preferred”. It may be YOUR definition of yield, but for folks in the real world who see real decisions- which often have nothing to do with preferences and everything to do with finances, yield is just another number.
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Obviously, we are a small sample, but I think going back to the main subject and OP, few are even paying attention to yield when determining colleges to apply to or attend. And I imagine in the general public, it’s less looked at or even ever thought about - then the CC where we are all zany in our own way.
A college will use it in recruiting because a high # is a great metric, just like many show high student retention. You probably don’t see Indiana State bragging that 1/3 don’t return for second year but Brown will share it’s 97% rate for sure.
2022 Freshman Retention Rate at National Universities | US News Rankings
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UVA IS Yield is like 60% - a top choice for many
UVA OOS Yield is like 25% - a 3rd choice for many
So in the past, the OOS yield probably WAS slightly under the OOS acceptance rate, but I believe the OOS acceptance rate has dipped under 20% so AO’s statement no “longuh holds wotuh”
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Funny how you picked those two colleges. 
For Michigan, the yield has been running around 45% and they actually increased class size this past year to 7,290, according to the admissions profile (no CDS yet). My D18’s class was around 6,680-6,695, IIRC. Anyway, I considered that yield in the “desirable” range.
As for Cal Poly, as you too well know, I took the enrollment projections that are published and then I used an estimated yield rate in order to calculate an estimate of the # of acceptances for D21’s major and other relevant (to us) majors. I/we were trying to see which majors may or may not be “easier” to be accepted into at SLO. Fortunately, we went with the major she was most interested in and she was accepted.
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Yield is the percentage of admitted students that choose that institution to matriculate. There are LOTS of reasons a student might not choose a given school, including absolute cost restrictions or perception of value. Not wanting to equate the words preference and choice is simply semantics. Part of the Dictionary.com definition of prefer is “tend to choose.” By choosing a specific institution they are indicating that given their totality of reasoning, it’s the institution they ultimately prefer. Before we get a wrist slap, it’s probably best we call a truce. 
To me, yield is irrelevant from a student perspective. With the exception of a few elite schools (Harvard, Stanford, MIT) where most accepted students will choose to attend, yield rates are all over the place even at the most selective of institutions.
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I think it has more to do with self selection. For example, suppose you have a theoretical class of 100 high achieving kids in a Michigan HS. For half of them, Michigan is their first choice, and for the other half, Harvard is their first choice. The kids whose first choice is Michigan probably won’t apply to Harvard as a backup in case Michigan rejects them. That wouldn’t make sense because Harvard is notably more selective than Michigan. This group doesn’t apply to Harvard, so the half of kids whose first choice is Michigan generally don’t hurt Harvard’s yield.
However, many of the kids whose first choice in Harvard probably will apply to Michigan as a backup, in case Harvard rejects them. Michigan is notably less selective than Harvard, so it is a likely a popular backup application among in-state kids (“backup”, not safety, I realize Michigan is highly competitive). This may negatively impact Michigan’s yield. An equal portion of the class favored Michigan and Harvard, yet Harvard’s yield is expected to be ~100% in this group, and Michigan’s much lower.
In this way, yield tends to be correlated with perceived selectivity, more so than perceived desirability. The more selective the college, the higher the expected yield, regardless of how small/large a portion of students actually like the college.
As noted, another key component to yield is use of early round and wait list. If a theoretical highly selective college with top FA admits 100% of their class ED, then they are expected to have a near 100% yield. No colleges actually admit 100% of their class ED, but many admit the majority of their class in the early round. A related factor is favoring kids who are more likely to attend for other reasons besides just ED/REA/SCEA.
Another important factor is for lack of better word “uniqueness.” For example, BYU typically has >80% yields that are similar to Harvard/Stanford and well above most Ivy+ colleges. BYU is far less selective than Harvard/Stanford and they don’t use ED/REA/SCEA. Instead BYU’s high yield more relates to its uniqueness as the key Mormon college in Utah. Among kids who are interested in a Mormon college in Utah, most don’t see a better alternative than BYU. I expect few would have first choice as Ivy+, then apply to BYU as a backup in case they don’t get in. That wouldn’t make sense. If you want a Mormon college in Utah, far more common would be to apply to BYU and not apply to Ivy+ colleges.
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A low yield rate makes it more likely that a school will over or under enroll. Going from 10% to 11% has a much larger impact than 80% to 81%.
The primary purpose of calculating yield is for enrollment management. Both under-enrollment and over-enrollment create problems for schools.
Yield is an interesting metric, but first year retention rate and four & six year graduation rates are more important in my view.
Due to the substantial difference in tuition, it would be interesting to compare Michigan’s resident yield to its non-resident yield. First year resident tuition and fees = $16,178 versus $53,232 for non-residents.
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The Class of 2024 was a bit of an anomaly:
For the Class of 2025, Michigan accepted almost 1,000 less students than the Class of 2024 (16,000 vs 17,000) and the number of applications increased from 65,000 for the Class of 2024 to around 80,000 apps for the Class of 2025.
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Retention and graduation rates mostly correlate to admission selectivity and affordability. So any attempt to correlate that to student desire and happiness at the school needs to sort that out from the much larger effects of academic failure and running out of money that are the main reasons that students drop out of college. Obviously, students who fail academically or run out of money are not happy, but they may not have been unhappy if they were not affected by such things.
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OP here. Thank you all for your many replies. A normal yield rate (whatever that is) would not be a significant factor in our family’s college considerations. So whether a college’s yield is 30% or 60%, it makes little difference to us.
But @Catcherinthetoast was closer to my original thoughts. I was thinking more of less selective and non-prestigious schools. For instance, a Colleges That Change Lives college or a directional state university that only has a 10% yield rate. Should that set off an alarm bell? It seems as though additional research would be recommended, whether into finances, student support, academic offerings, etc. But perhaps that is normal if not considering a T50 or T100 school.
And at what point should alarm bells start ringing? 20%? 10%? 5%? My initial reaction is that 5-10% is cause for concern, but this is not an area that I have given much thought about and thought that the CC community would have more experience across an array of institutions and regions to offer its feedback.
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Based on 2022 Acceptance Rates Comparison Between Public (4 year or high) California Colleges (which has yield numbers in the generated tables), it looks like there is considerable variation by state. For example, California public universities tend to have low yields, probably because there are lots of them, and many students apply to many of them but can only attend at most one. Meanwhile, Alaska has only three public universities, but they have much higher yields.
Remember that there are other ways colleges can manipulate yield besides using ED. Playing the “level of interest” game (i.e. rejecting or waitlisting “overqualified” applicants who are unlikely to matriculate because they appear to be using the college as a “safety”) is usually called “yield protection” around here.
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I think this is at least due in part to the fact that many CA publics are far more competitive than the AK schools. They will accept higher caliber students more likely to attend other schools that they see as more desirable.
Interestingly, the yields in the table don’t match those reported if you click the school link.
Thanks for clarifying your concerns/interests in the data. Look more at the retention rates for returning freshman and the graduation rates. I think those are more telling than yield for the schools you are trying to dig in on.
Returning Freshman rates less than 85-90% and Grad rates less than 75-80% would be cause me to look deeper at the data. If it is a large commuter school or serving an adult population on non traditional pathways those numbers may be off.
Retention rate and graduation rate are directly related to the overall quality of the student body. Lower retention and graduation rates would have very little meaning for well qualified student like the ones typically discussed on CC.
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Understood, but I was responding to the OP’s refreshing post directing us to think outside the normal CC scope: