<p>There has been a discussion in another thread about the usefulness of the yield number in this day of the common/universal application allowing increased ease of sending many applications, more students sending applications to 15-20 schools, and many schools sending no-cost or personal applications. I still think yield has some usefulness, even though it is an easily manipulated varaible, as it is an indicator of how many students choose to attend a school, but others disagree. Thoughts?</p>
<p>^^^I think this makes yield more relevant and selectivity less relevant. Or rather, yield less easier to “game” than selectivity. It still shows which schools are more appealing to accepted applicants. But I may be missing some nuance, so I’ll be interested to read what other people post.</p>
<p>I’m sure if I was a math type person, I could come up with some formula that took into account a schools acceptance rate along with the yield rate to rank which schools really are most desirable come May of any given year, and that could help people see if their wait list chances are viable. But I’m a humanities girl, so that’s beyond me :)</p>
<p>I think a very low yield is a red flag. For example, my son is looking at schools like Elon, CofJ and Muhlenberg, and someone else suggested Drew. But when I looked it up - the yield was about 11%! I think that is the lowest I have ever seen. I understand a lot of NY/NJ use Drew as a safety school - but 11% says to me that very few students actually want to attend this school.</p>
<p>I guess I can take RobD’s analysis one step further…not only does yield provide an indication for waitlists…but… </p>
<p>in some situations, schools do not reveal the ED acceptance rate before RD decisions come out; given that ED is 100% yield, it helps to know how many kids were accepted ED…one can extrapolate not only the target # for RD but also a general idea of how many will be accepted RD based on previous year’s yield…</p>
<p>an example may be better: I’m using fake #'s but this was similar to Vandy’s 2008 scenario…based on the Vandy Admissions BLog…</p>
<p>Total class goal: 1250 students</p>
<p>ED acceptances: (both EDI and II) maybe 400</p>
<p>Leaves: 850 to fill</p>
<p>Vandy’s traditional yield (backthen) was around 33% (making this up by the way)</p>
<p>That means they would accept, let’s say 2200 students in RD…(again fake numbers)…</p>
<p>When it was posted that they received 12,000 apps for RD (for example) one could readily see what the RD acceptance rate was and how difficult it would be to be accepted…(as if they didn’t already know)…</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, I think the yield just clarifies numbers for those who need a reality check (as seen in the example above)…</p>
<p>I think it means nothing this year in a scenario with top schools where it seems that everyone applies to every school that has a name…</p>
<p>In terms of waitlist viability, I guess one could speculate that if the school was stingy in RD acceptances, yet had a smallish yield, they would have a better chance of being accepted off of the waitlist…</p>
<p>What is most suprising this year (and why I think yield is useless) is that those schools going to waitlist (Yale??) have a traditionally high yield, yet went to the waitlist quite quickly…and honestly, other than curiosity, I could care less other than to make conversation on CC…</p>
<p>edit: cross posted (of course) with rm: I agree that an 11% yield would raise a red flag to me…yes, that’s one reason why yield could be important to parents and students…</p>
<p>another edit: RobD: I had no idea that you were a “mom” not a “dad” until today…gotta love the internet…</p>
<p>^^In the case of Drew, my guess for the low yield has something to do with money. This school has a very expensive sticker price of about 53,000. It has a nice campus, but definitely does not have everything spruced up and maintained as some other campuses that I have seen. They also seem to gap financially. I think that many students who do not worry about financial aid might apply to Drew, but also apply to schools in NYC (ie: NYU, Fordham, etc.). They think there is an overlap among students who would like to attend a school either in or close to NYC. If they are accepted to one of the schools in NYC, they may decide to enroll at the school located in NYC. For those who need a good deal of financial aid, many will see better packages elsewhere. JMO. Editing to add that Drew also has a priority application. If one is on their mailing list, one might get one. Many of these applicants are not really interested so much in Drew, as they are in getting accepted early to college.</p>
<p>A school’s acceptance rate is a simple function of three variables (the first of which tends to look like a constant, although it can usually be varied a little): Beds/Yield/Applications. Where a school has ED, Yield is a weighted average of 1.00 and its RD yield (which tends to be a lot lower than 1.00), weighted on the basis of how many beds are filled ED (generally between 25-50%).</p>
<p>So . . . Beds doesn’t change much year-to-year, and is very expensive to change. It doesn’t really have anything to do with quality, except that when colleges don’t expand to meet demand they make their slots scarce and therefore more highly valued. Applications does change year to year, and a school can affect that relatively cheaply by marketing and PR. Yield – Yield seems to be remarkably sticky. A change of 3 percentage points in Yield from year to year is unusual, and huge. It’s probably the best measure of how popular a college really is, as long as you are sure you are comparing apples to apples. (E.g., you can’t directly compare ED colleges and colleges without ED, and public universities, especially flagships, that provide a significant cost advantage to in-state students tend to have relatively high yields for in-state students.)</p>
<p>To see the importance of yield, look at MIT and the University of Chicago. They both have the same system (unrestricted EA), they got a similar number of applications this year (MIT 16,600, Chicago 19,200), which is much closer as applications per available bed, since MIT is about 15% smaller (about 15.5 at MIT and 14.3 at Chicago). But MIT’s yield is in the high 60s%, and Chicago’s yield in the high 30s%. The result is that Chicago’s admission rate is twice MIT’s (and used to be 3-4 times MIT’s). Chicago’s applications have more than doubled in the past five years, but its yield has fluctuated in a range between 36% and 39%, with no clear upward trend.</p>
<p>Okay - you guys have to help me out. (I am clueless at math). </p>
<p>Are you basically saying that if I see a low yield at top colleges like U Chicago, Wash U, or Northwestern then what I am seeing is that kids accepted to those schools were also accepted to the HYP + and chose the higher ranked college?</p>
<p>^^or possibly a financial aid situation (as explained by northeastmom with a different example)</p>
<p>Kajon - What you are saying can be very correct. Tulane is the poster child for this. They embarked on a strategy in the early part of the decade to raise the quality of their incoming classes as measured by test scores and class rank. They knew they were not considered at the level of Wash U, Chicago, Duke, Vandy, etc. (never mind the Ivies), and so what they did was employ a strategy that involved very heavy marketing which included easy applications especially targeted at students that normally would only have applied to the above mentioned schools, frequent mailings, and generous merit based scholarships. They also quite often got back to those top students very early with an acceptance and the generous scholarship (to the tune of about 2/3 tuition in many cases, 1/2 tuition in many others, and this is all before financial aid money) and got their attention. Long story shorter, they got tens of thousands of these “extra” apps, most still didn’t choose tulane, but a significant enough of them did that Tulane has seen a fairly dramatic rise in the class quality and this year at least is over enrolled by about 100 students (1680 or so compared to a target of 1500-1550). So by design, selectivity looks much better (24% acceptance rate this year) but yield plummets (17% this year). Jym and I (good friends, btw) disagree on the impact this has regarding perception and importance. I maintain that as long as Tulane keeps achieving their goal of “stealing” some few hundred of these kids that otherwise would have gone to higher rated schools, lower yield is a small price to pay. Higher average quality classes far outweigh any negative impact of yield, although I will readily admit that most people would never look into why the yield is low. I think it is just one of those situations where Tulane cannot have its cake and eat it too, so they made their choice.</p>
<p>Certainly Tulane has its fair share of those that also don’t go because of cost, but that has always been the case. The variable that has dramatically changed over the last few years is the number of applications (from about 14,000 to 44,000 over the last 7 years), and a huge number of those “extra” ones come from those elite students that do eventually decide to go with the bigger name schools. That situation is most responsible for the drop in yield from the 50+% mark before this strategy to the current 17%.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It just means that they chose other schools. They don’t have to be higher ranked necessarily. For example, here in IL, there are quite a few kids who might be accepted to both NU and U of I who would attend U of I – they might not perceive the cost differential to be worth it (even in relatively well-to-do North Shore families) when U of I has a good enough name (esp in engineering) and / or NU’s financial aid might not have been enough.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I happen to agree with you (sorry jym!). Yield is the college’s problem, not the student’s.</p>
<p>I don’t see yield as a big problem. Most students don’t even look at those numbers. When RPI was a safety for my older son I saw that yield was low even though SAT scores were high. So what if RPI is filled with MIT and Caltech’s leftovers?</p>
<p>I respect Tulane’s strategy. Instead of resisting being viewed as a safety school, they’re embracing the role and encouraging the Ivy-bound to apply. Some small number of the new candidates will either fall in love with it or get disappointed by their other acceptances and end up at Tulane.</p>
<p>Catching the Ivies’ crumbs is only a bad thing from an ego perspective. If your goal is to enroll the best class by hook or by crook, it’s very smart.</p>
<p>To me, its in part an “image” or “perception” issue. I dont want this thread to turn into another discussion about one particular school, and don’t want to rehash what FC and I have discussed in the TU forum, but to respond to the posts above, it seems a little troubling to me that students are being “stolen” rather than that students truly want/desire to attend one school over another. Its a subtle difference (positive vs negative perspective), but can be an important one. I dont disagree with FC on that aspect per se, and both his d and my s can be considered 2 who were “stolen” from a higher ranked school. I was reading in another forum-- have to go back and check-- I think it was Wash U and I think it was tokenadult who posted about the importance of yield #s. </p>
<p>I don’t quite follow JHS’s math (can you dumb it down for me, JHS?) but when my head stopped spinning, I did understand, and agree that a 3% change in yield can be huge. </p>
<p>I also agree that finances are a huge part of this equation. Some schools may be “dream” or “hot” schools, but are simply unaffordable.</p>
<p>Ahh… here’s what I was reading-- about the jump in yield to 55% at Dartmouth. <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/dartmouth-college/926975-55-yield.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/dartmouth-college/926975-55-yield.html</a></p>
<p>There are two reasons for high yield. The reason most often cited is that it reveals a preferred school. Given the choice of a number of schools, A is preferred over B and B over C, etc.</p>
<p>The second reason for high yield is that the applicants are a self selected group. The most obvious example of this is BYU. Mostly mormons apply and it is a stong preference of the applicants. There are other religious-based colleges that have similar yields. Another example is large state Us that have great appeal within their state, but because of the IS-OOS tuition difference few OOSers tend to apply. Hence, a higher yield that one would expect. Typically high-yield, high-acceptance rate colleges have a significant degree of self selection in their applicant pool.</p>
<p>^^ Yes, standrews, apologies that the issue of religious affiliated schools (BYU, ND, Yeshiva, etc) wasn’t addressed here, as it was in the other thread that prompted this discussion. Another issue, that was mentioned above, I believe, is the yield difference between schools with binding ED vs those without ED. Rice discontinued EA a few years ago and now has only ED and RD. I would look back to see what that did to its yield, but then again it has been simultaneously increasing its undergraduate size over this same period by about 30%, so the yield # would be skewed. Can anyone think of another school that d/c’d EA and has only ED and RD?</p>
<p>St. Olaf discontinued EA two years ago, and now has only ED and RD. There is a certain amount of self-selection due to its Lutheran affiliation, but reports are that it yielded 800 students this year, up from the usual 750 or so, so the move to ED/RD has been a success. Students who REALLY want to go there are well advised to apply ED.</p>
<p>
Let’s not get hung up on wordplay. I always put stolen in quotes because I was using it in the very limited context that the school attracted a candidate that would never have even applied before the marketing. Of course the student then decides if they want to go there, they have free will presumably. In fact, the vast majority decide not to. I don’t look at either as a negative, which is exactly my point, any particular school aside. With applying being so easy these days, and kids being told over and over and over to apply to reaches, apply to safeties, apply to financial safeties, etc. etc. in the end they can only pick one school. That is why, among other reasons, I think the concept of yield as an indicator of anything is an anachronism.</p>