<p>Then ask a question worthy of an answer!</p>
<p>Again, do you really want me to define the terms admission rates and selectivity when used in the context of … college admissions?</p>
<p>I know the formula for admissions rate.</p>
<p>Are you suggesting that schools with equal admissions rates are equally selective? </p>
<p>What do you think admissions rate tells you? (and no, dont tell me the formula, the formula for yield is just a cut and dry)</p>
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Gee, like Nebraska it couldn’t be because it is, hmmm, let’s see…oh yes, their STATE SCHOOL and therefore a fraction of the price? Comparing Nebraska or Florida to any private school other than the Ivy elites in this regard is simply nonsense. Of course it is the destination school for the huge percentage of the students, who also are state residents. That is so silly it pains me to point it out.</p>
<p>BTW, calling an admissions strategy a “gimmick” is a rather soft insult. That “gimmick” involves other components such as generous merit scholarships, and has resulted in increasingly stronger classes academically. I know you know this, so not sure why you chose to describe it so ungenerously. Anyway, since in the end it is actually, in a sense, the point of Tulane’s strategy to get, as xiggi once put it, rejected 5 out of every 6 times by students often heading for Harvard, Duke and other extremely fine schools, I think we are back to yield not telling you much. It isn’t an artifact, it was an expected result when they embarked on the strategy. Tulane could go back to the old strategy when the # of applications was a lot lower, the admit rate was about 55% and yields were far higher. What would that yield stat tell you about the school? Absolutely nothing. In fact, to the extent that people for some reason take a high yield as indicating better academics, it would tell you exactly the wrong thing, since a major part of the academic environment is the quality of your peers. You’ve got to love it when schools get slammed for trying to increase the quality of the student body which, btw, takes a hell of a lot more work than if they had just left things the way they were. 44,000 apps is a ton to work through with a staff a fraction of the size of many schools that get fewer apps.</p>
<p>In the end, the students that wanted to be there are there, and the students that aren’t were, in fact, using it as a safety, (or couldn’t afford it, or picked a similar school like Miami because they just decided it was for them). So what? It tells you that Harvard and Duke and Wash U are more desireable for a lot of students than Tulane? Only if by the numbers you can somehow discern the cross applications of the students. Even if you do infer that, it is hardly news. A look at the USNWR tables tells you that.</p>
<p>So I think in the absence of understanding what strategy a school is using, it tells you little about how much the applicants want to be there. To back that up, Tulane consistently ranks high in Happiest Students surveys. Doesn’t exactly go with your hypothesis about yield as an indicator in that regard.</p>
<p>BC:</p>
<p>I’m not sure all the schools in your example support your point:</p>
<p>College - Admission Rate (ipeds)</p>
<p>BU - 54%
American - 53%
RPI - 42%
Wake 38%
Rochester 39%</p>
<p>Clearly the top two are safeties for many, even without the yield.</p>
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<p>Then how do you explain the fact that state schools in the Northeast have such low yields, even though they, too, are a “fraction of the price” for state residents? I think it’s actually quite revealing that Nebraska’s yield compares pretty favorably to the most selective Ivies, while UConn’s doesn’t come anywhere close. I’m not saying Nebraska’s yield is similar to Yale’s for the same reasons as Yale’s; nowhere did I make that claim, or anything even remotely close to it. Clearly they’re playing in different markets and appealing to different customer bases. </p>
<p>But that’s interesting, because many regular posters on CC write as if there’s just a single national market for higher education in which HYPMS are at the pinnacle, the rest of the Ivies, Duke, Chicago and a few other elite privates are a step down from there, the rest of the top 25 privates and possibly AWS another step down, then perhaps some other selective LACs, then some slightly less selective private universities, with publics more or less at the bottom of the food chain. And that might indeed describe the market in the Northeast. But it doesn’t describe the market nationally. In a state like Nebraska, most students of all levels of ability want to go to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, most who apply are accepted, and the vast majority of those who are accepted attend. That’s very different from a state like Connecticut. Connecticut residents also apply to UConn in large numbers, but a huge percentage of them see it as their “safety,” and a large fraction of those who are admitted will end up going elsewhere, in many cases to a school higher up the food chain (as they see it)—even though the economic reasons for Connecticut residents to attend UConn are pretty much indistinguishable from the economic reasons for Nebraska residents to attend the University of Nebraska, except perhaps for travel costs. (I should think that point obvious, but I won’t resort to name-calling to make it). </p>
<p>Look, I don’t think yield tells us everything. The additional details you provided on Tulane’s strategy are interesting. But yield doesn’t tell us nothing, either. That is, it can tell us something, especially in combination with other data and other sources of information (are you listening xiggi?—I never said yield ALONE was the be-all and end-all, only that it’s a data point that shouldn’t be ignored). </p>
<p>You know how many Nebraska residents applied to Harvard in 2009? Not more than 67 (we know that from College Board data on how many 2009 college-bound Nebraskans sent one or more SAT I and/or SAT II score reports to Harvard, as Harvard requires SAT IIs from all applicants, even those submitting the ACT in lieu of the SAT I; so the 67 score reports from Nebraska represent an upper bound on completed apps from residents of that state). This from a state of 1.8 million people. More than 7,000 Nebraskans sent in ACT score reports to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, more than 100 times the number who applied to Harvard (the most popular Ivy among Nebraskans); of those 7,000+, roughly half indicated UNL was their first choice. (Of those not indicating UNL as their first choice, about half indicated UN-Omaha, and another quarter UN-Kearney). UNL had 9,709 applications in total that year, out of which it accepted 6,122 (63.0%) and 4,200 enrolled (68.6% yield). The most popular private school among Nebraskans was Creighton, in Omaha, which got ACT score reports from 1,519 Nebraskans, a little over 1/5 as many as UNL; of those, only 381—roughly a quarter of those sending ACT score reports—indicated Creightoin as their first choice. Bottom line, UNL was their first choice of nearly 10 times as many Nebraskans as the most popular private college.</p>
<p>What does this all tell us? Well, I think it tells us that the Northeast-centric view of the shape of the market for higher education simply doesn’t apply to Nebraska, where the vast majority of students prefer to stay in-state, and a huge fraction make their state flagship their first choice, a substantial fraction of those applying are accepted, and a strikingly high fraction of those accepted choose to attend. It tells us that public higher education plays a very different role in Nebraska than in the Northeast, where public education is largely seen as a last resort for those who can’t get into “someplace better.” Of course, many of us suspected this already. But it’s nice to have some data to back that up, and yield data is an important piece of that puzzle.</p>
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<p>I don’t follow you. Admit rate alone doesn’t tell you whether a school is a “safety,” as my Nebraska example (post #85) indicates. In principle you could have a school where 100% of the applicants made it their first choice school, and two-thirds of them were accepted. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln comes closer than any school I know to approximating that. UNL may be a safety for a few people, but all the evidence suggests most Nebraskans want to stay in-state, and by a wide margin they prefer UNL to any other school in the state (or by an even wider margin, any out-of-state school). Of those who apply, nearly 2/3 are accepted, and of those accepted, most (68.6%) choose to attend. It’s a happy little closed system for Nebraskans, a large fraction of whom seem to get just exactly what they want. But its high acceptance rate doesn’t mean UNL is a “safety” for large numbers of college applicants. I very much doubt that it is. Maybe for the 67 (or fewer) Nebraskans who applied to Harvard, but probably not much beyond that.</p>
<p>There are so many factors, as you correctly point out, that it does in fact make yield rather meaningless. By the time you account for all the other factors as to why yield is high in Nebraska, low at UConn, admissions strategies at various schools, etc, yield becomes a statistic that is, in fact, rather meaningless. Northeast has more wealth, the states are smaller making travel to other schools easier (lots of RI kids go to UNH, UMass, UConn and UVM, there are tuition exchange agreements between these schools in most cases, so maybe not as obvious as you think regarding that factor) and of course there are tons of private options available. I am sure with some thought there would be a lot more factors, like a higher percentage of college educated parents. All these things play a role as to when the state school is more of a safety and when it is a destination.</p>
<p>So yes, yield at a particular school can be explained by looking at other factors, but since the particular factors that affect the yield at any given school can be quite different, even if the resulting yield looks about the same, there is no reason to spend any brain cells looking at the yield. You would have to look at all these other things to get a true picture anyway, so might as well look at them to start. I suppose to the extent that seeing a very high or very low yield raises a flag, it might get one looking into the explanation. That makes it a trigger, not a useful statistic in and of itself.</p>
<p>bc:</p>
<p>will it be easier to “follow” if you separate publics and privates (like I and others suggested previously)? IMO, a private college with an admit rate above 50% just ain’t that hard to get into, i.e., “safety”, and I don’t need it’s yield to yield additional information.</p>
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<p>For the simple reason that 1) most applicants to UNL are Nebraskans, and 2) UNL is by far the most-applied to school among Nebraskans, and 3) of those who apply, half indicate it’s their first choice school (according to ACT), and 4) of those Nebraskans indicating any school other than UNL as their first choice, the vast majority name schools like UN-Omaha, UN-Kearney, Creighton, Nebraska Wesleyan, or community colleges that are EASIER to get into than UNL, so that it’s highly unlikely that any except the demented among them would see UNL as a “safety,” and 5) it’s the YIELD, after all, that tells us a very strong majority of those accepted decide to attend. </p>
<p>That, and the fact that the numbers of Nebraskans applying to more selective schools are paltry. The ACT state report lists the 30 most popular schools receiving ACT scores from Nebraskans; UNL is the most selective college in the bunch. The 30th most-popular school received ACT reports from just 207 Nebraskans, so we can infer any selective school received fewer than that. The SAT state report is slightly more revealing. The selective schools receiving one or more SAT I and/or SAT II score reports from the most Nebraskans were: Stanford 93, Wash U 76, MIT 68, Harvard 67, Princeton 59, Chicago 56, Yale 55, Northwestern 54, Duke 45, NYU 40, Cornell 39, Columbia 39, Brown 37, USC 37, UC Berkeley 35, Notre Dame 33, and on down from there. Most of these schools either require or “strongly recommend” that all applicants send SAT II scores, even if they’re using the ACT instead of the SAT I; so anyone who completed the application should have sent SAT II scores. And you know there’s got to be substantial overlap, with many applicants applying to several of these schools. So my best guess is not more than 200 Nebraskans total applied to ANY school that was more selective than UNL; and of those, probably some didn’t apply to UNL. So that leaves, what, maybe 150 or 175 using UNL as their safety?</p>
<p>Look, it’s just a very different market out there. UNL is at one extreme, but there’s a lot of this in many Midwestern, Western, and Southern states, where a far smaller fraction of the student population applies to selective private institutions. In most of the country, public higher education does most of the work. In some states like Nebraska, those who even aspire to a fancy private school are true outliers, vanishingly small in number. I think the data support that, and the yield data are an important part of the picture.</p>
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<p>Sorry, I didn’t catch your earlier posts. Well I suppose in a way that’s my point, too, that the markets for public and private higher education are very different from each other, and differ internally in different parts of the country. I will grant that a private college or university with a high admit rate is likely (almost certain?) to be viewed as a “safety” by some substantial number of applicants. But the reverse is NOT true: a low admit rate doesn’t mean a private institution is NOT viewed by many applicants as a safety. Tulane is clearly a case-in point. Tulane’s admit rate of 26% is quite low; yet its yield of 15% indicates that it is NOT the school of choice for the vast majority of those who apply and are accepted, insofar as 85% of them are electing to go elsewhere. Now maybe it’s not quite a “safety” for some of them, but at least it’s a “back-up,” a school they might consider if they don’t get into their first choice. But I suspect it IS viewed as a safety by many who think their stats are strong enough to make them shoe-ins, even though the admit rate is low. (They may be wrong about that if, as I think fallenchemist suggested, Tulane rejects some Ivy-caliber applicants it thinks it won’t be able to land). So the yield figure still matters in giving us, in combination with other data, a better understanding of the admissions picture at a school like Tulane than we would get from looking at the admit rate alone.</p>
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<p>Haha, Clinton, I am listening --well, let’s say I am actually reading. </p>
<p>I believe we might be talking about different things altogether. Because I tend to look at the admissions numbers from the viewpoint of an applicant, I focus on the data that might help ascertain the chances of an applicant. On the other hand, one could look at data as an educational researcher. In this case, I fail to see why applicants should worry about yield at all. </p>
<p>For instance, if I were one of the 30,000 applicants to Harvard, I might worry about the 7% admit rate. Now, why would I worry about the fact that 70% or 80% of the chosen ones might decide to attend? Further, assuming that I am among the lucky 2,000, what difference does it make how Harvard ends up filling its class. For all I know, they will underadmit and fill 10% via the waitlist. Again, this type of information is important to the enrollment managers and MIGHT be interesting to a scientist. My point is that I fail to see why this is important to applicants and why this is fueling such debates on CC. It seems to me that there must be a dozen issues that are more interesting to discuss. You know, silly things such as faculty resources, class sizes, overcrowding, etc. </p>
<p>Oops, perhaps I made a mistake in mentioning overcrowding … as this might result from an underestimated yield. :)</p>
<p>Well yeah, looking at any stat alone doesn’t give you much of a picture, and neither admission rate nor yield are close to giving a good picture in that regard. BTW, it doesn’t bother me at all to say that Tulane is a safety for kids with stats to get into Duke, Ivy schools, etc. That’s a fact for 98% of them (the ones without felonies, lol). No, I don’t think I actually did say they reject Ivy caliber candidates, and as far as I know they don’t. My D certainly fits that description and she won the DHS at Tulane, but then I am an alum and she did show tons of interest, so not really fair to use her. If it happens it is because they have some hidden blemish (so I guess we would use the term Ivy stats candidate), or they showed so little interest and applied late they might get wait listed. But as far as I know Tulane is nowhere close to Wash U in that behavior, as demonstrated by the fact they don’t really care if the yield comes out low. They have a very specific goal in mind, stats be damned to some degree, anyway.</p>
<p>I certainly agree that the pattern of apps for UNL is going to be quite different than for many other state flagships and certainly than for privates. FYI, 19% of the students attending are from OOS, but it doesn’t give the stats as to what the acceptance rate was for OOS. Too bad.</p>
<p>bclintonk - thank you for your posts. I continue to be amazed by the northeast-centric point of view that says that “everyone” aspires to HYPSM, then to the rest of the top 20, and so on and so forth. There are people on CC who actually don’t seem to get that for many kids, Vanderbilt and Emory and WUSTL and NU and whatever are actually kids’ first choices, and not everyone thinks of them as sloppy seconds to HYPSM. Your Nebraska description is spot-on. They really don’t seem to get other regions of the country, where smart students are perfectly happy to go to state flagship u’s and aren’t all over HYPSM. For being so northeast-elite, they can be shockingly unsophisticated.</p>
<p>72% of acceptees to Emory choose to attend elswhere…
68% of Northwestern’s acceptees go elsewhere</p>
<p>Vandy does better and only ‘loses 6’ of ten acceptees (41% yield)</p>
<p>Even with WashU’s extensive gaming by use of a WL, 7 out of ten go somewhere else…</p>
<p>I have no opinion on whether they go to NE colleges (nor do I care). Many of these ‘elsewhere’ acceptees may go to their instate publics.</p>
<p>So what? Some are going to more highly ranked colleges – some are going to places where they have gotten more financial aid – some are going to less expensive state publics. What’s the point? </p>
<p>bclintonk’s list of where students in each state send their SAT scores proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it all continues to be incredibly regional in nature.</p>
<p>bluebayou,</p>
<p>It’s much easier to get higher yield when you are competing more with schools like Univ of TN, MS, Georgia, South Corolina, Kentucky than when you are competing with Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois. I also think Northwestern shares more cross-admits with HYPMS, in addition to next-door rivals Notre Dame and UChicago.</p>
<p>I haven’t caught up on this thread and will have to read the posts I have missed more carefully. Just wanted to say that when we were looking at schools for our kids yield was a meaningful data point for us. For instance, the University of Chicago has had a huge increase in applications in the last couple years and has therefore suddenly emerged as “more selective” and a higher ranking in USNWR. However, its yield has remained stable (or close to it–I think). What does this tell one? It tells me that Chicago is a back-up school for many kids. The only way to determine what is really going on, at least for our family, was to check out historical admit and yield rates. For instance, BC had a huge increase in apps the last three or so years and was suddenly much more “competitive.” However, looking back, one can see that their usual admit rate was in the low thirties. This year (Class of '14) they’re back to 31% or so admit rate. Yield, again, this year, is low as it has usually been for top-forty school (25%)… Again, a back-up. Now why these are ultimately not chosen is an entirely different question–aid? location? just plain higher prestige? etc. etc. The <em>reasons</em> why low-yield schools are low-yield is worth investigating.</p>
<p>Sam:</p>
<p>You are making my point, (thank you).</p>
<p>Just because something isn’t a slam dunk first choice does not always make it a “back up”. If a student gets into Harvard and Yale, they obviously have to pick one. Does that make the other a “back up”? A student gets into BC, Wake and USC. They have to pick one, so the other two were back ups?</p>
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<p>On an individual level, no. Individuals may have all sorts of reasons to choose one school over another; some of those reasons may be common to many individuals, some may be idiosyncratic. But if a school consistently loses 85% of its admits to its competitors, then following the logic of the “revealed preferences” study that got a lot of attention a couple of years ago, it seems pretty obvious that said school is not deemed as desirable by its admit pool in the aggregate as some other schools with which it shares a lot of cross-admits; at least, that’s the judgment most of its admits are making when all the offers, FA awards, etc are on the table and a final decision needs to be made. IIRC, the “revealed preferences” study of HYPMS cross-admits assumed that at that super-elite level, the driver was perceived “prestige” of the competing institutions. At the Tulane (or CMU or Emory . . .) level, I would guess other factors also come into play, like size of the FA award, net cost, distance from home, etc.</p>