<p>I don’t think it’s a question of stolen. It’s a question of letting bright students you have something wonderful that might entice them away. Chicago did a very good job, I thought, of marketing themselves this year, especially to the EA kids. Nearly every piece of mail they sent out said “We’re quirky!” “We’re intellectual!” and “We offer something the Ivies don’t!” and most importantly “We’re fun enough!” How many Ivy bound kids turned them down? I don’t know. I know for my older son it was really, really hard to turn down Harvard for Carnegie Mellon. And my younger son agonized about turning down Chicago - in fact if he’d been a little more Type A (like an Ivy applicant) he might well have gone there.</p>
<p>It’s really wrong to characterize the yield at Chicago or Northwestern as “low”. </p>
<p>Chicago, for example, doesn’t have an Early Decision program. Its yield this year was 39%. Dartmouth HAS a binding ED program under which it accepts about 40% of its class. So Dartmouth’s 55% yield this year consists of about 42% of the class accepted ED with a 100% yield and 58% of the class accepted RD with a 42% yield. Last year, Dartmouth had a 38% yield RD, compared with Chicago’s 36% yield. So Chicago’s yield is only slightly lower than the yield Dartmouth gets from its admits who have a choice.</p>
<p>Very few private colleges have RD yields much higher than 40% – it’s really just the Ivies (most of them, most years), Stanford, MIT. Not sure about Duke. The top LACs don’t – Swarthmore’s and Amherst’s yields from RD admissions are usually under 30%. HYPSM, with their 65%+ yields and no ED, are a huuuuge anomaly.</p>
<p>jym, look at it this way: A college has a certain number of beds for freshmen. It wants to fill all of them, but doesn’t want to fill MORE than all of them. So – regardless of how many applications it gets – it knows pretty much how many students it will accept. It will initially accept slightly fewer students than it would need under optimistic yield projections to fill its class. If its yield is normally around 37%, maybe it will initially accept based on a 40% yield, and then use its waitlist to fill the class if the actual yield is less than 40%. So, if it has 1,000 beds, or slots, it will initially accept 2,500 applicants, which is 1,000 divided by 0.40 (40%). If it gets a 38% yield from those acceptances, it will have 950 enrolled students, so it will go to its waitlist for 50 more students.</p>
<p>Its acceptance rate will be those 2,550 acceptances divided by whatever number of applications it actually received. If it got 20,000 applications, it will have an acceptance rate of ~13%. If it got 10,000 apps, the acceptance rate will be 25.5%.</p>
<p>But thats my point, FC. If you look at the link to the Dartmouth 55% yield, the very next post in the thread says something like “wow- popular school”. Yield is a reflection of desirability, whether it be for religious, financial or other factors.</p>
<p>Yes, there are lots of variables affecting the application process and yield. But with students applying to so many schools and being able to attend but one, what are the significant variables affecting yield? Why is yield going up at some and down at others (again, covarying out the ED issue, wonderful FA packages at some of the top schools, etc)? If students apply to 20 schools and reject 19, why isnt the yield lower across the board?</p>
<p>St. Andrews:</p>
<p>The third reason is net cost. For example, a student might have dreamed of attending Notre Dame or Wake Forest or…[fill in the blank] since they were little, but once accepted find out that the need-based aid is not great. All of a sudden, that no-loan private college, or instate Uni, or (higher-ranked, well endowed, great need-based aid) college looks REALLY good. Add in the merit $$ colleges…</p>
<p>Well we all know the Ivies have high yields, that was a given from the start. They are in an exceptional situation. It is hard to find statistics online going back that far, but I bet that for non-Ivies, yields probably have dropped in general over the last 7 years or so. Mathematically they have to have, because the total number of apps have more than doubled in that time, according a NY Times article I read a while back, and while there is a bulge of students the last few years, it is not anything close to doubling. Some of that will be mitigated by students just getting turned down by applying to more reaches, but they are also getting accepted to a lot more schools than before. So yields by definition have to have declined.</p>
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<p>Doesn’t everything in life have “some usefulness?” This would surely apply to yield in the world of college admissions. However, when it comes to students and parents, the yield statistics does not offer much (if any) value. While some expect the most recent yields to lift the curtain on the chances of cracking a waiting list, the reality is that yield is a metric that remains in the domain of “usefulness” of college administrators and college enrollment specialists. For parents and students, it is a glaringly irrelevant piece of information, with the notable exception of college boosters who might jump at the chance of bragging about the statistical whiff of implied academic superiority or basic popularity.</p>
<p>The reality is that yield can represent different things to different schools, depending on their respective selectivity. A lesser selective school can increase its yield by not admitting students who have real chances at a better ranked school and focusing on students for whom the lesser selective represents the MOST selective choice. </p>
<p>Schools have many options to boost their yield. As others have suggested, the use of binding admissions (with 97% yield in highly selective schools and 90% nationwide) gets most of the (negative) publicity. In addition, the dynamic use of a waiting list works in a similar manner as a school can ensure an extremely high yield through private discussions with potential candidates. </p>
<p>All in all, USNews made the right call when it dropped yield from its algorithms. Now, if the august magazine would also consider eliminating the rest of the easily manipulated elements!</p>
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<p>Jym, because the number of applications does NOT affect the yield. You have to look at admitted students. For instance, at the Ivies the number of applications have been increasing by between 15,000 to 20,000 per year. However, you have to look at the number of ADMITTED students … it has remained eerily stable at about 24,000 for the eight schools combined. OTOH, the admission rate has fallen --12.75% in 2008, 11.90% in 2009, and less than 11% for the most recent class.</p>
<p>Totally understand-- and thats exactly what I said in my post/response to FC, which seems to be caught in the cc black hole (which seems to happen when 2 posts are attempting to post simultaneously, and mine didn’t make it) - That yield is affected only indirectly at best by # of applications-- its only directly a measure of # of acceptances relative to # of admission offers</p>
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<p>How many other admitted students choose to attend X school wouldn’t have any bearing on my own decision to attend X school. </p>
<p>It’s about as useless as saying “Well, 20,000 kids choose to apply to Harvard and only 5,000 to Haverford, so therefore I should apply to Harvard too.” What other people do is simply irrelevant.</p>
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<p>Xiggi - is that 24,000 just adding up all the admitted students (recognizing that students admitted to more than one Ivy are counted twice), or removing any “overlaps” (that is, students who were admitted to more than one)?</p>
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<p>JHS, would not say that Chicago has been hugely popular in the last three admissions cycles? Does this not make your first quoted statement contradictory to the comparative example of MIT and Chicago? </p>
<p>Could it be that the popularity of a school is mostly established by students at the application time, and that the variablity of the yield is rather … insignificant?</p>
<p>“How many other admitted students choose to attend X school wouldn’t have any bearing on my own decision to attend X school.”</p>
<p>I would give this factor greater than zero weight in my decision. Not much greater than zero, but greater.</p>
<p>Why? Because I want to go to school with kids who really want to be there. It’s not a perfect analogy to college, but this was a factor for me choosing a law school. I viewed NYU as a very, very serious contender for a number of reasons, even though I’d gotten in to Yale, Harvard, and Stanford. At the NYU admitted students weekend, my would-be future classmates and I talked about our choices and why we were still on the fence, and when they found out where else I’d gotten in, they all looked at me like I’d lost my mind for even visiting NYU. That dropped NYU in my eyes a bit – I didn’t think it was a good thing that I’d have so many classmates who viewed NYU as merely the best of their disappointing options.</p>
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<p>PG, it is impossible to know the number of unique students, except for the 4,000 students who were admitted under ED and perhaps the 700 admitted by Yale under REA. </p>
<p>We know that there are many cross-admits and can establish a range via the combined yield, but we do not know exactly how many.</p>
<p>Chicago has gotten increasing attention and has attracted increasing applications. It got more applications than MIT this year. But I don’t think that means it’s “more popular” than MIT, when twice as many of the students MIT accepts enroll there. Both numbers are relevant – who’s applying, and who’s enrolling.</p>
<p>(Of course, even with Chicago and MIT, with the same admissions system and similar sizes, and a pretty substantial applicant overlap, you still have an apples-to-apples issue in that both institutions are somewhat restricted in their course-of-study offerings, and inconsistently so.)</p>
<p>PG-
What other people do is relelevant to many people. If it wasn’t, thre wouldnt be articles and HS chatter about “hot” schools. Teenagers pick colleges for lots of frivolous reasons, as have been entertainingly posted in several threads here. Perhap adults do a better job of making independent decisions with less social influence (heaven knows my wardrobe is not a fashion statement of the latest “in vogue” styles influenced by the buyers). Many teens pride themselves on being independent thinkers, but many are influenced by popularity.</p>
<p>*** cross posted with Hanna***</p>
<p>JHS-
Do you think that U of Chicago’s decision to use the common app. and I believe the personal app. (yes?) this year accounts for the significant increase in applications? Did it also affect the yield, or just the # of applications?</p>
<p>xig-
Do you think the administrators consider the yield (consciously or unconsciously), when they do their peer assessment? Don’t get me wrong, I think the peer assessment is BS, and I am not a fan of the USnew’s system at all-- but have to wonder if this pesky yield has any indirect influence on people’s perception of schools, especially where popularity contests come into play.</p>
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<p>I agree – however, the fact that the yield of a given school may be relatively low doesn’t mean that the kids who wind up going there don’t want to be there equally as much as the kids who are going to the high-yield school – no? As an example, I have no a priori reason to believe that the kids who wind up at U Chicago really want to be there – even if there is a reasonably large number of potential classmates who said, “Eh, thanks for the admit, but too quirky, I’ll pass.”</p>
<p>This all makes me wonder about something I’ve tossed around - when you apply to a college, the college obviously doesn’t REALLY know if you’re dying-to-be-there (unless you apply ED) or it’s just the sloppy-back-up-plan. (And, I don’t think the college really cares beyond the ED pool. They want to choose who THEY want, not who wants them the most.)</p>
<p>But I wonder. If every student were given, say, 10 points of desire, and had to allocate among all the schools how many points of passion they give each school (they could lay all 10 on one school and go for broke, or 2 for each of 5 schools, or whatever), and schools could see those points, how would that impact the gaming strategies? (Or would it just create a secondary market on eBay trading in excess points?)</p>
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<p>I understand that part, but that was not exactly the point I was making. People --or so they say-- look at the trends in admissions. As you wrote, the yield at Chicago has not changed (for the very good reasons we all know) but its applications have increased by leaps and bounds. Since there is little doubt that this explosion in applications reflects a growing popularity (or the perception that it is one of the few great schools that was not highly selective) I do not think that the example of Chicago supports a claim that “[Yield] is probably the best measure of how popular a college really is, as long as you are sure you are comparing apples to apples.”</p>
<p>The fact that most people decide to attend the best school at which they were accepted AND at which they can pay the bills is not necessarily a sign of … popularity.</p>