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<p>Jym, who are the persons who fill the survey? What they consider or pretend to consider has been debated ad nauseam. I think that some admins respond with integrity and rely on data. Others …</p>
<p>“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?”</p>
<p>In the absence of other, better, data, I think the higher-yield school is more likely than not to have greater freshman enthusiasm than the lower-yield school. But I am not claiming that this will be true in every case, or that it ought to be dispositive unless the student is truly on the fence and ready to flip a coin.</p>
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<p>I don’t, because I don’t think anyone outside CC and outside adcom offices bothers to calculate or care. Really.</p>
<p>Thats a good point, Hanna. I think enthusiasm might be an interesting benchmark. How would one measure that?</p>
<p>I don’t know, but I’d bet money that BYU has more of it than anybody else, and it’s not unrelated to their sky-high yield.</p>
<p>What about schools without the strong religious affiliation?</p>
<p>OP: I think yield has more important role to play in this world of student applying to more than 10 colleges.</p>
<p>The higher yield along with high selectivity indicates the real top colleges.</p>
<p>Perhaps yield is a measure of perceived value. This would account for the high yield at both Harvard and BYU. Perceived value also factors in net cost of attendance which tends to lift the yield of flagship state U’s. </p>
<p>The number of applications might also be a measure of perceived value, but yield is generated from students who are putting their money where their mouth is.</p>
<p>With many of the Ivies, a middle class family knows that they are going to get a substantial financial aid package if accepted. Using the present example, U of Chicago, there are 2 strikes against it; perceived to be not on par with HYPS AND you don’t know how much financial aid will be provided. </p>
<p>When you apply at an Ivy, you know that IF you get in, finances will not be much of a factor.</p>
<p>^ That doesn’t make any sense at all. Chicago’s application numbers have soared precisely because is IS perceived to be on par with HYPS – or at least in the neighborhood of par – and people who get accepted there have as much certainty about their aid as anyone accepted at HYPS. The problem is for students with family incomes greater than $60,000 and less than, say, $150,000 – a lot of students – Chicago’s need-based aid is often less. That may cause people to pick other colleges over Chicago if they have options with more aid – I’m sure it does – but it shouldn’t keep people from applying , or cause people who don’t have better aid elsewhere to turn it down.</p>
<p>A Chicago student, in another thread, said that Chicago actually awards more aid than HYPS, but that its student body is meaningfully less affluent than that of HYPS, leading to a lower per-student amount of aid for middle-class students. According to him, the only reason HYPS appears more generous is that its admissions strategy produces a class with a greater percentage of full-pay or near-full-pay students. I haven’t been able to confirm that analysis, but it is sure interesting.</p>
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<p>Comment 1: I am not sure I understand the implication that yield plays an important role for students who apply to more than 10 colleges. Does yield play a bigger role for someone who applied to all the UC colleges and 3-4 LACs in California than it would for someone who applies ED to Dartmouth? Or did you mean that it plays a role for students who became serial applicants and were blessed with 10 admissions? </p>
<p>Comment 2: How does that work? Should we not first establish what is this “higher yield” and how high is “high” selectivity? How do we go about comparing Princeton’s yield to Dartmouth’s 55% in 2014? How do we compare the yield of Notre Dame to Duke’s. How do we compare the yield of the top five LAC in the nation?</p>
<p>Can a school not be a real top college with a low(er) yield? Can a school with a high(er) yield still be lower than “highly” selective?</p>
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<p>But then, should we not ask why this only changed in the last … three years? Why this the school lag its “peers” ny such margin before the surge? Did Chicago improve its financial aid drastically? Did it change academically since 2007? Or were there other elements in play? </p>
<p>Oh, and yes, speaking about not making any sense whatsoever, the discussion about financial aid at HYPS versus Chicago most definitely falls in the “defy common logic and facts” category.</p>
<p>Chicago enrolls a higher percentage of Pell Grant recipients than HYP. Harvard enrolls 9%, Yale and Princeton 10% each, Chicago 13%. Unfortunately, Chicago does not publish a Common Data Set. This makes aid comparisons a little harder.</p>
<p>As for the surge in Chicago’s applications, I’d attribute it to a change in admission directors, adoption of the Common Application, and apparent increase in direct mail marketing. This year its admit rate dropped to 18%. I don’t know if the average test scores went up as dramatically (presumably not, since they already were quite high even when admit rates were over 30%).</p>
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<p>Well, not exactly. Chicago still gives significantly less aid than the upper elites. Last year, Chicago gave out $76 million in financial aid. Compare that to the $105 million or so that Princeton is giving its students, and you’ll see that it’s not quite equal.</p>
<p>In explaining this a while ago, Chicago gave a few reasons for why its financial aid package didn’t compare to the upper elites. Firstly, Chicago as an institution doesn’t have the financial resources to compete with these schools and secondly, Chicago has on average less wealthy students than these schools, so even if Chicago and Princeton gave out an equal amount of money per student, Princeton’s financial aid package would still be better. My suggestion was that as Chicago gets more “elite” and starts picking up wealthier students, its financial aid packages are going to get better on average, even if Chicago doesn’t change that $76 million statistic.</p>
<p>Now, whether or not this analysis is valid depends on exactly how much needier Chicago students are on average compared to the upper elites. When I saw Chicago’s claim that its students were needier, there were no hard statistics to compare it to (except for the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants, as stated by tk above), so the claims may be exaggerated. Also, I’m not sure, but since financial aid doesn’t seem to be part of the endowment report, it might have been (and probably was) a part of the Odyssey scholarship campaign.</p>
<p>^^</p>
<p>The number of Pell grantees is hardly relevant. It suffice to look at Cal or UCLA to understand that a high number of grantees does not equate to a great commitment to financial aid. Similar discussions appeared on CC when Mini tried to convince the board that Smith had better financial aid than Harvard. </p>
<p>Most people who were aware of the 76,000,000 of need-based aid (and the 7,000,000 merit aid) must also know that similar figures were much higher at Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford. While Chicago’s budget represents a gargantuan sum of money and a laudable effort, Harvard’s budget was 145 million last year and Stanford’s undergraduate financial aid program for the 2008-09 academic year was more than $114 million.</p>
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<p>OK, as I said, I had not been able to confirm phuriku’s statement, and what is said above makes more sense to me.</p>
<p>But it’s worth pointing out: Given the difference in numbers of undergraduates between Stanford and Chicago, Chicago’s $83 million in aid is not so far off Stanford’s $114 million. Chicago’s aid represents the equivalent of full funding (at $50,000 @) for 32% of its students, and Stanford’s represents full funding for about 34.5% of its students. If Stanford’s athletic scholarships are included in the $114 million, that almost certainly accounts for more than all of the difference. (Harvard and Stanford being the same size, and Harvard lacking athletic scholarships, Harvard’s aid budget is truly on a different plane – about 44% of full funding. Princeton’s number would represent full funding for 40% of its students.)</p>
<p>I would love to see this analysis for the peer colleges that do NOT have substantially greater resources than Chicago – Brown, Dartmouth, Duke, Penn.</p>
<p>As for the components of Chicago’s increase: more publicity, certainly (starting with USNWR’s “upgrade” in 2005), and much more and more intelligent marketing efforts. But also a significant new financial aid program introduced in 2007, a 20-year history of systematic steps to improve the quality of the undergraduate experience, new dorms housing over half of the entering students, and continued failure by the more popular Big Intellect colleges to expand to meet demand, which pushes a lot of qualified candidates out to their next-choice colleges (among which Chicago competes very well). Also, real changes in the actual and perceived safety of Hyde Park compared to the 80s, and a general trend favoring urban research universities. Chicago’s application numbers have been increasing steadily for the past 7-8 years, not just the past three years.</p>
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<p>JHS, since I do not have the same intimate knowledge of the University of Chicago as you do, I will gladly accept your comprehensive list of reasons behind the growth of applications. However, in a naive way, I still might suggest that the relative ease of admittance (in comparison to other schools ranked in the top 20) might have influenced the “renewed” perception of the school. </p>
<p>In addition, since I do not have your experience in tabulating admission statistics, I will again gladly defer to the number that predates 2003 … when I started looking at such things. </p>
<p>Here is what my limited access to data suggests: </p>
<p>Classes Applications and changes over prior year
2007 9,100<br>
2008 8,757 -343 -4%
2009 9,039 +282 3%
2010 9,542 +503 6%
2011 10,384 +842 9%
2012 12,385 +2,001 19%
2013 13,565 +1,180 10%
2014 19,370 +5,805 43%</p>
<p>I’d say that an increase from 9,100 (2007) to 9,542 (2010) is indeed steady as the average is about 100 more applications per year. However, a jump from 9,542 to 19,370 seems to deserve a slightly more generous qualifier. </p>
<p>Perhaps I should go read some of the last years’ posts about Chicago’s growth. Me thinks I could find a few terms that are more enthusiastic! :)</p>
<p>^^^: The dramatic increase validate one thing for sure that ranking plays a big role and
US News is being looked at by a large number of applicants to decide where to apply.</p>
<p>US News started displaying “World ranking by Times” starting with class of 2012 -2013</p>
<p>[World’s</a> Best Universities](<a href=“http://www.usnews.com/sections/education/worlds-best-universities/index.html]World’s”>http://www.usnews.com/sections/education/worlds-best-universities/index.html)</p>
<p>which ranks U Chicago at 7 in the world above every US universities except Harvard and Yale.</p>
<p>ParentOfIvyHope, are you familiar with the methodology used in this new survey? Have you read the type of questions asked in the Peer Assessment part? Do you know how schools have been … pre-selected? </p>
<p>Just curious!</p>
<p>^^^: I don’t know but the point was that it seems after the ranking appear at US News site the applications for U Chicago has doubled.</p>
<p>I see a direct connection between the two incidents as it doesn’t seem to me a coincident and nothing has changed for U Chicago between the class of 2011 - 2013.</p>