Yes, the school did get it right. But it’s still yield protection. They accepted kids with considerably lower grades/stats because they had a much higher chance of attending.
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@InquiringMom2 thanks! It was a balancing act for sure!
How can they ascertain that?
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As an applicant you can’t ever definitively say whether you (or some other applicant) was yield protected or not because you don’t have all the details. But a policy of preferentially accepting those that are likely to enroll and deferring/denying those less likely to enroll is the definition of yield protection.
Edited to add: these decisions are definitely not based purely on stats.
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I don’t think immigrants are bewildered. People are not stupid to not understand the system. Some immigrants are upset that they are being discriminated against even when they have a holistically strong resume / package, because there is an extra ethnicity element that is out of their control.
For colleges that are not need blind- it is yield protection to reject a kid who needs a huge financial aid package that you will not be able to provide?
I think every acceptance is a “preferential acceptance”. Adcom’s get paid to fill the class. period, full stop. They are not goodwill ambassadors for the cause of higher ed, they are not emissaries for whatever political or social cause happens to be in vogue that year. Their university president, provost, and board determine the college’s mission and institutional priorities, and the admissions team seek to enroll a class consistent with that mission. Berea isn’t accepting Bill Gates’ kids (not their mission) and Mt Holyoke isn’t accepting men (or humans who are biologically male and identify as men), Julliard isn’t accepting the tone deaf, West Point isn’t accepting kids who are overweight, sedentary, and have early onset diabetes. This is ALL “preferentially accepting those who are likely to enroll”.
WHAT is the problem?
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The reason why the public has a say is because colleges often get Federal and State money.
I wouldn’t say I’m smarter about this whole process - I’ve just read a lot and realized a few years back that getting into a selective school would be a challenge for my kids. Since I got married late, a lot of my friends have already gone through the process with their kids so I’ve heard all the horror stories (valedictorian getting shut out etc). With my S22 the process hasn’t been too bad because he applied mostly to T50-75 range schools where he has a good chance of being admitted and where the gyrations described above are not a pre-requisite for acceptance.
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No. You’re conflating simply making an acceptance decision (admitting those who qualify and meet the institute’s priorities - like the examples you have provided) with making a “preferential” acceptance. The latter is where they may not accept an applicant solely because they think s/he will not enroll (typically based on past data based on the profile or the applicant’s HS/region, etc). Example: the qualified applicant is from the other end of the country with excellent in state options and data shows most admitted applicants from there choose to stay local and don’t enroll. A yield protecting college will choose to defer such an applicant.
So the two approaches are not the same. Some colleges (Tulane, Tufts, NEU and Chicago come to mind) are known to care a lot about enrollment. NEU even hired a “Chief Enrollment Officer” recently.
Sure, you and others are free to continue believing there is no difference between the two approaches and that colleges don’t care whether an applicant they are offering admission to will enroll. But in the real world, many colleges do care a lot about enrollment yield.
It’s not a problem as long as applicants are aware of these practices when applying so they can plan their applications accordingly.
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??? I don’t get to tell the Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic which patients to enroll in a clinical trial (or which oncology fellow to accept and which one to reject) just because they both get state and federal money. Your logic escapes me.
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The logic is not that hard :-). The public deems some preferences acceptable, and some not. For instance, you cannot hide behind a board of trustees if you are admitting people of only a certain ethnicity. Likewise with other preferences… There is a large grey area. If schools are very comfortable with doing whatever they are doing, they’d proudly proclaim it. If they are not fully comfortable to admit what they are doing, they hide under the umbrella of “holistic admissions”.
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No pun intended I assume! Balancing ballerina…
Every school practices ‘yield protection’ as some seem to be defining it. Harvard knows the percentage of students who usually accept admission, and definitely based the number of total acceptances on that number. If they know 84% will accept (historically) and they know they want a class of 1600…the most students they can accept without over-enrolling is around 2000 students total (depending on enrollment results from EA).
At that point, they have to figure out who matches the institutional priorities (as defined by the President, Provosts and Board of Trustees) as well as who they think will most likely enroll. They aren’t looking to validate whether a student can do the work or would be academically successful - most applicant to Harvard would be. They are looking for the students who match them. That seems to bother some people on this list. I am not exactly sure why.
Schools with lower yield rates have less certainty when it comes to who will enroll and who won’t. If your institutions yield rate is 35% and you need to fill a class of 2000…you could end up offering ~5700 students admission. The more students you need to admit to fill a class, the less likely you have control over making sure the yielded students fit the institutional priorities.
How do you make sure you are replacing the tuba player who is graduating? How many tuba players do you need to accept to enroll the 1-2 you want? How do you make sure certain departments won’t be over-enrolled because you accepted too many applicants who wanted to be engineers? How do you make sure you will still yield the geographic diversity your school values?
That’s when ED (and EDII) start to come in handy for the institution’s priorities. If you can fill some of the class with people who are committed to attending, you have a much better sense of what kind of institutional needs have already been fulfilled and what needs are outstanding during RD. That allows the Admission Office to have a better idea of who they can and can’t accept at that point.
EA works in a slightly different way, as far as I can tell, with helping the AOs find students that they may want to try to entice to enroll with the relief of an early acceptance and possibly generous merit aid. EA might also be used to accept students for whom the school is a match/low reach and therefor the student may again be more likely to enroll because the school is a “higher target” for that student.
Schools that evaluate ‘demonstrated interest’ definitely are practicing a specific form yield protection - they want students who want them because the AOs job is to fill a class, not validate individual applicants. In addition to demonstrated interest, many schools now use as much data as possible to figure out whether the demonstrated interest is ‘genuine’ in terms of if the interest shown often leads to enrollement. They have algorithms that predict how much money they need to offer each student to get them to enroll (and they are looking for the lowest amount that will convert the kind of student they are looking for to a ‘yes’).
A great student whose application reads as one who most often doesn’t end up enrolling may well get deferred. Why would the school be anxious to use one of their admission slots on an excellent candidate with only a marginal chance of enrolling? That only leads to more uncertainty on the school’s part. Deferring applicants like that give the school a chance to see whether that student shows more interest (which may indicate a greater chance of enrollment), as well as giving the school more time to see who else enrolls and how much wiggle room they have to offer Hail Mary acceptances to excellent applicants they would love to have but can’t waste a space on at the beginning of the admission season.
I wish more parents and students could see the process more clearly from the school’s perspective. Not because I think anyone needs to give sympathy to the schools, but rather because if you don’t understand the motivation of an institution you are trying to work with - you will often misinterpret the actions and aims of said institution.
College admissions is in many ways a ‘friendly adversarial’ process. Students have their wants and needs, colleges do as well. Both are trying their best to look as good as possible. If a student’s wants and needs match the college’s - acceptance and happiness! If they don’t - many students and parents seem to feel incredibly betrayed. If more went in understanding the self-interest on both sides - maybe more would understand
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So, it looks like we’re mostly on the same page @beebee3
Except: Sending out X acceptances to fill a class of Y, where Y/X is the expected yield rate is standard practice at all schools. Yield management is when they actively mange which “X” applicants to accept to keep that yield number where it is or try and bump it higher.
Nuanced difference perhaps.
Anyway, don’t really plan to dwell on this so I’m moving on 
This is not the “public”, this is a matter for the courts and the law. The “public” doesn’t determine which practices are illegal and which ones are not.
I hire people for a living. I can decide that I don’t want to extend an offer to anyone who is late for their interview. As long as that doesn’t systematically exclude women or people born in Yemen or people who use a wheelchair- it’s perfectly legal.
Y’all are conflating lots and lots of different things in determining that Yield Protection is bad and illegal and your arguments are somewhat nonsensical. Yield protection isn’t excluding a protected class, it is not excluding entire groups of people based on the color of their skin. Unless you think there’s some massive conspiracy going on by Northeastern et al? Is that your claim?
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Every school practices yield prediction, but not every school plays the level of interest game to practice yield protection.
But also note that the predicted yield at the margin of admission will be higher than the predicted yield for the most obvious admits at the top of the admission class (often the ones who get the biggest merit scholarships at colleges that offer them – such merit scholarships are ways to try to influence the yield of such admits).
A college may choose to admit such a student, knowing that they have only a 2% chance of matriculating, so admitting 50 such students adds a predicted 1 (presumably top-end) student to the class.
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People are aware of which categories of people are protected and which are not. No one is saying that it is illegal. But there is a vast gray area where some practices that are not considered illegal might embarrass a university. The university doesn’t want to admit openly that some complicated game playing is happening, even if it is widely suspected. We wouldn’t be having such a vociferous defense against yield protection if every one thought it was completely kosher. At a minimum some set of desirable future students may simply not apply. I am not saying anything more than that.
Sorry should have fully spelled that out. Kid who don’t love being in school for 4 years straight could find co-op to be a bonus. Of course many kids who love studying might also find NEU a good fit.
I’ve known NEU graduates who’ve been people who wanted to have a career and knew they needed a college degree to get there. I know the school now has very competitive applicants and naturally most of those will be those who want to study. I wasn’t inferring that kids who don’t like studying should attend NEU. I think it’s a great fit for the right student.
“A college may choose to admit such a student, knowing that they have only a 2% chance of matriculating, so admitting 50 such students adds a predicted 1 (presumably top-end) student to the class.”
Yes, but if they offer $ to them all as well and end up with 10 enrolling, they’ve made a mess of their financial plans.
And if this happens in several categories, they may not have enough housing for them.
There is a reason that so much effort goes into enrollment management.
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I think we have such divergent views on this topic because of the conflation of yield prediction/yield management/enrollment management with yield protection. No one has denied, at least in this thread as far as I can tell, the necessity for a college to do the former. The latter is different. If an applicant checks all the boxes (not just stats but in all the categories, including demonstrating interest and mutual fit) for a college, and s/he clearly would be a great addition to the college, but s/he is deferred/denied for no reason other than the college is uncertain about the likelihood that s/he will enroll only because s/he seems to be “overqualified” and may have better college options elsewhere, that’s yield “protection”.
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