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<p>Why rural Missouri? In my upper middle class Northern Virginia suburb, you would find few (if any) students who have heard of all of those schools. LOL</p>
<p>I pick on rural Missouri because MOST (not all, most) kids there probably have three or four schools on their radar screens. In NOVA, even though the kids may not know or care about “the W’s”, they are likely to have a more robust list of what- 10? 15? colleges that “everyone” has heard of. Yes- Whitman can do a better job targeting NOVA HS kids so they don’t all “bunch up” at UVA and VTech and William and Mary. But at least there’s a list of more than three schools that the GC’s talk about.</p>
<p>At the local HS almost all of the college talks centered around the VA state schools. In all fairness, VA has terrific public colleges. </p>
<p>LOL, everyone around here knows Wittenberg, the others notsomuch :)</p>
<p>Some small points: There isn’t that much difference between admission rate and yield, and to the extent there is a difference it’s sure not clear that yield is a more informative measure of quality or even of popularity.</p>
<p>There are probably only two easy, more or less objective ways to measure a college’s popularity: How many people apply? (applications) and What percentage of people offered admission choose to attend? (yield). The best measure would be comprehensive, objective cross-admit data . . . and good luck getting that and making it usable. The studies that get referred to here were really experiments in social science methodology, and didn’t have anywhere near the data base one would need to produce an analysis that would tell you anything meaningful about colleges’ relative appeal. (Assuming you cared about that in the first place . . . but some people clearly do.)</p>
<p>Admission rate is really just a function of both variables, plus a third. Most simply, it is admission offers divided by applications. Admission offers, however, turns out to be maximum desired enrollment (slots) divided by yield. All three variables are manipulable to some extent by colleges, although slots is a lot less manipulable than the others – it’s both really expensive and slow to build more slots (and building more slots will tend to increase the admission rate unless it also increases applications and yield), and it’s quick but really expensive not to fill available slots with students who are willing to pay for them. </p>
<p>Applications can be increased in the ways that everyone is complaining about here. Yield can also be increased – by relying more and more on ED and other early admissions strategies, by paying a lot of attention to “expressions of interest” on the part of applicants, by judicious use of “merit” scholarships, and by not admitting the students most likely to go elsewhere. Harvard’s yield is over 80%, but it could probably get somewhere near 98% if it simply stopped admitting students who were likely to be admitted to Yale, Stanford, or Princeton. Harvard “wins” a majority of cross-admit contests with all of them, but nowhere near 80% with any of those three. They (and maybe MIT) are responsible for almost all of the students offered admission at Harvard who go elsewhere. (And don’t tell me that Harvard admissions officers can’t do a pretty good job of guessing who will be accepted at Yale, Stanford, or Princeton.)</p>
<p>If you relied just on applications, or just on yield, you would get some anomalies. Some colleges have very specific appeal, and their applicant pools are self-selected. BYU, for example, enrolls more than three-quarters of the students it admits, which is a really high yield, probably exceeded only by Harvard among national universities. However, it only attracts 30% the applications Harvard does, and it’s three times Harvard’s size, so even with that sky-high yield it admits half of the people who apply. </p>
<p>The University of Nebraska is another, similar example. It’s 66% yield is up there with most of the Ivies, but it gets fewer than 10,000 applications per year, most of which are from people in Nebraska, and most of them are offered admission. The University of Wyoming and Swarthmore have very similar yields – but Wyoming is six times larger than Swarthmore, and gets a third fewer applications. Wyoming essentially admits everyone who applies, and probably has room for a few more people. A criterion that tells you Wyoming and Swarthmore have comparable appeal is more than a little misleading.</p>
<p>And, few people apply to Wyoming who don’t want to be at Wyoming. </p>
<p>^^ Their loss. Those at Wyoming are happy to be paying $5000/yr while those at Swat are writing checks for 10 times that amount.</p>
<p>They are, indeed, happy to be at Wyoming.</p>
<p>USNWR rankings reflect lemming behavior. just because thousands of hopefuls apply to one school doesnt make the entire school good. it just means the college makes lots of $$ on unrealized dreams</p>
<p>Coincidentally, my D just received two emails from Swarthmore today, which is late in the app season. Swarthmore is the college Frank Bruni identified in his NYTimes piece. The first email specifically points out the short 250-word essay supplement and the second email waived the Common App fee. </p>
<p>I mentioned the article to D after she told me about the emails and she replied, “Eh, Swarthmore has emailed me numerous times before.” </p>
<p>It would seem that the college is making it no-cost now for her to apply, except for having to write the additional essay. </p>