Right on for UT but then why didn’t UT take fewer kids and wait to see who enrolls and then go to WL?
What’s going on with her College’s waitlist? If they already released then likely overenrolled.
I am not sure but I would think that the WL releasing is not over. The email may be to gauge how many more they can take off the WL.
Deferment is when a student is admitted to a college and delays starting for a year. A gap year is just not going to college straight after high school.
I’m not sure the definition matters. Many people use the term gap year after they’ve committed to a college and then they request a gap year. Anyway, I’m sure that kids who graduated high school in 2020 and just applied to college this year are not the reason for overenrollment.
Like I said, until we can see the actual numbers - how many each school accepted compared to normal years and see the yield, we are all just guessing.
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Because they didn’t think it would unfold this way, nobody did. Remember just a few months ago all of the experts were talking about lower yields and heavy use of wait lists?
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I think the point is that it may have exacerbated the issues this year. The applicant pools were already larger than usual due to uncertainty and test-optional policies, and then you add in the gap year kids from 2020. As for deferred enrollment vs. gap year, I would assume the gap year kids would apply to more schools this year, but who knows. Maybe some of the ones who deferred decided to try their luck with some new apps, knowing that they had an acceptance in their pocket. I’m also curious as to how admissions viewed those 2020 grads. It will be interesting to read the post-mortem on this whole cycle in a few months when everything quiets down and the final numbers are known.
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Still, it seems risky to accept too many kids. Why not accept the same as usual, deal with getting fewer on May 1 to enroll and then use WL? That way the school can control the size of the class. The only thing I can think of as a reason to accept more kids and assume they will have lower yield (to end up at the “normal” sized class) is greed. Schools decided to err on the side of having too big of a class because they lost so much money last year and they figure that, if they have too many kids coming, they’ll figure it out somehow - stuff them in dorms, have larger class sizes. Better for them than to fall short.
Not good for any of us.
I hope schools that are overenrolled figure out the best way to serve their students. I know Kenyon is offering $5 -$10k for kids to defer a year or a semester to lighten the load on campus. They’ve offered $5k to anyone who will start their year abroad too. That’s the kind of thing we might start seeing.
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As far as double deposits go, one of our local public schools in Georgia just released in the last few days their Val and sal. The Val listed his schools as UCLA or Georgia Tech. Not sure if that means he is deposited at both or waitlisted at UCLA and unable to give up on the dream. I don’t know anyone I could ask but thought it interesting.
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It’s my understanding that this is what has happened at Georgia Tech. The top private schools in Atlanta are sending some of their best and brightest to GT this year because their REA applications didn’t work out as expected from prior years. These are kids who are not only at the very tippy top academically but are nationally and internationally recognized award winners. Generally from these schools an Ivy or top LAC works out for these kids, often times multiple choices. These kids don’t choose GT as a rule unless they receive the Stamps full ride scholarship. Didn’t happen this year.
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The UT example above referred to the possibility that yield on auto admits is higher than usual because of all of the unusual results in the super selective schools (this is not an example of them accepting more than usual). Schools don’t purposely ‘accept too many kids’, they are trying to hit an enrollment target. It sounds like this year with so many hard to predict factors a lot of larger schools may have overshot. You can call it greed, but over-enrollment is a huge headache for them to deal with (housing, class availability, etc.), so this is not something they take lightly (deliberate growth in enrollment is a different thing).
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Colgate accepted about 500 more kids than usual. I don’t have the numbers handy but something like 3000 kids instead of 2500. Their yield in 2020 was around 27% for a class around 675. If they hit the same yield this year, the class will be 810. This is what I mean about schools taking more kids - I suppose they maybe thought their yield would go down and they’d end up around that 675 mark. No one knows yet how big the class actually is but we think bigger than normal since they told the WL kids that there’s very little chance of them using their WL this year.
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Yes, schools expected yield to go down, and some hedged accordingly. It seems like most wait lists have been very quiet. The ‘experts’ have been wrong on their predictions!
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If quite a few selective colleges and universities overenroll, where is the impact felt? Ultimately at regional private and public Us?
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Unless the over enrollment is due purely to gap and deferral students. In that case, it should all wash out next year. Maybe. I’m so confused.
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Last year Stanford encouraged students to take a gap year. Approximately 22% (378 first-year students and 14 transfer students) took them up on their offer. Stanford News
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I think that’s correct. The much-lower-ranked schools would suffer. It will be interesting to see how the numbers shake out, though hopefully some higher ed reporter will distinguish between more selective and less selective schools rather than reporting an unhelpful aggregate, like “college enrollment is the same or dropping.”
On the double depositing discussion, I would be surprised if this turned out to involve significant numbers. I haven’t heard of anyone doing this.
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Intetesting. It doesn’t seem like a waitlist spot would be mentioned, but neither would double depositing.could be this— I just heard from an acquaintance that their kid is either going one of 2 places. They have committed to the first, but are still waiting on final aid numbers from the second (Pomona). I hope Pomona’s waitlist is still open, or is this another over enrolled school so it doesn’t matter.
This is interesting. Why would a school encourage students to take a gap year in general? Does that allow them to lower their acceptance rates for the next year and thus game the rankings? For Stanford it would not matter but would other schools be doing this for this reason?
Syracuse and a some other schools also did that, they couldn’t get the FA done before May 1st so they will reimburse the deposit paid at another school if you decide to attend.
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