Cause ED2 are ED1’s rejects. Not always of course but mostly. I would guess it’s something of an image thing.
@publisher my suspicion is that at amherst and williams the vast majority of accepted ED are recruited athletes. Although williams and amherst both have ED1 they have no ED2. A lot of deferred rejected folks from Ivies move to Pomona or claremont mckenna for ED2 round, which is why I suspect Pomona has a higher yield by a good margin. In any case, if schools that are 2nd choice to Ivies had ED2 there’d be a lot of EA/SCEA/ED rejected/deferred kids who look for ED2 I would hypothesize.
and Chicago, which is master application/yield game theory expert, has every possible option (EA, ED, ED2 etc…) so I don’t see the downside of offering ED2.
Back of the envelope has Amherst with ~160 recruited athletes. ED accepted 185.
MODERATOR’S NOTE: As with the other thread that was closed, this one is wandering off-topic and is also in danger of being closed. Please stick to the OP topic.
Back on topic; There are simply too many kids with near identical grades and test scores applying to all Ivies via common app in the RD round. Something like half the kids with perfect test scores and As get rejected by Ivies and next tier schools in RD round. So in addition to kids going to instate flagships at low cost (UVA, UNC , UM) instead of a large school like Cornell, the same kids are getting into multiple Ivies in RD.
IMO RD admissions is so competitive that many students feel forced to spread a wide net, applying to a number of schools that are not all equally preferred, because they don’t know where/if they will be admitted. In that situation they often wind up with multiple acceptances, but can only attend one school. Financial aid awards may contribute as well.
@anon145 , even if they don’t get into multiple ivies and “only” get into 2, they can still only choose one, raising yield at the one they choose and lowering it at the other. I wonder if there are any stats on kids who get accepted to more than one Ivy? I’m assuming for the kids that do get in, it’s not that uncommon… which certainly helps explain lower yields for any given school.
The colleges with the highest yield as listed in 2017-18 IPEDS are below. I am only including non-online US colleges that report ACT with at least 50 bachelor’s degree graduates. The are dozens more with near 100% yield, without these limitations. This group often has something unique about the colleges that is not replicated well at alternatives, such as the military universities or Brigham Young.
Colleges with >75% Yield
Logan University – 100%
US Military Academy – 98%
US Air Force Academy – 97%
US Coast Guard Academy – 95%
Bellin College - 95%
Bryan College of Health Sciences – 95%
Martin Luther College – 88%
Southwestern Christian University – 88%
College of the Ozarks – 84%
Harvard – 83%
Stanford – 82%
Haskell Indian Nations University – 82%
Brigham Young University – 81%
Florida College – 81%
Clarkson College – 80%
Cleary Univeristy – 80%
Purdue University: Northwest – 78%
MIT – 76%
Marantha Baptist University – 76%
Minot State – 76%
Nebraska Methodist College of Nursing – 75%
The group below limits to highly selective academic colleges, like HYPSM… In this case the yield rate is largely a function of selectivity and ED/EA/REA/SCEA policy. Early applicants have close to 100% yield at many of the colleges, so the more a college draws on early applicants, the higher the yield. Otherwise yield follows selectivity, as students tend to apply to less selective colleges as a backup, not more selective as a backup. For example, students whose first choice is their state school rarely apply to HYPSM as a backup in case their first choice state school rejects them, so they don’t knock down the yield for HYPSM in spite of it not being their first choice. However, students whose first choice is HYPSM do often apply to their state school as a backup, so it these students do knock down the yield for their state school. Another less significant, but still influential factor is having a unique admissions policy that favors “fit” students who are less likely to be admitted to or to favor other colleges. I expect this contributes to Caltech not appearing on this >50% yield list.
Highly Selective, Non-Military Colleges with >50% Yield
Harvard – 83%
Stanford – 82%
Brigham Young – 81%
MIT – 76%
Chicago – 72%
Webb – 70%
Yale – 69%
Princeton – 66%
Penn 65%
Olin – 63%
Columbia – 61%
Brown – 59%
Dartmouth – 58%
Cooper Union – 57%
Cornell – 56%
Northwestern – 55%
Notre Dame – 55%
Duke – 54%
Pomona – 54%
Clremont McKenna – 53%
Bowdoin – 51%
Barnard – 51%
Where do you get those numbers @Data10 ? They differ from the numbers found here: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2018-01-23/universities-colleges-where-students-are-eager-to-enroll (For example, the US News one has Duke at 50% and Northwestern 53%.)
I listed 2017-18 IPEDS… The USNWR link also is probably using IPEDS database, but they are using an older year – fall 2016. The IPEDS database is free to use and available at https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/ .
@lostaccount re: your post # 25- I could only get the abstract of your link. Do you have the whole article?
This is the article I was looking for. Its Its dated but the tables at the end are interesting. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=601105 It has to be downloaded but its a great article.
3 kids apply /accepted to 3 ivies. Each selects one. 100% matriculation to Ivy, 33% to each school. Lots of that going on.
“3 kids apply /accepted to 3 ivies. Each selects one. 100% matriculation to Ivy, 33% to each school. Lots of that going on.”
That is a better worded & more succinct version of what I tried to post earlier 
I think one point that is not often discussed while discounting schools with ED is that many schools that have ED still don’t have high yields because try as they might, they are not able to convince many quality kids to commit to them in the ED rounds
The fact is that it is not enough to have ED. A College’s ED pipeline had to be robust enough to support admitting a lot of kids without diluting the quality.
There are only a handful of schools in the US that can convince upwards of 3k to 4k kids to pull the trigger on commitment by applying ED. That says something about the strength of that school’s brand and is in my eyes almost as important as the yield rate. I would think that the multiple of a school’s class size it is able to attract in ED applications says something about the brand strength of the school.
So for example Harvard’s multiple is about 4:1. Brown is about 2:1, Columbia is 2.9:1, Cornell is 1.92:1, Dartmouth is 1.93:1, Princeton is 4.16:1, UPenn is 2.89:1 and Yale is 3.21:1
This roughly aligns with how applicants perceive these schools. It doesn’t explain everything, but has a lot of explanatory power
For some of the best LAC’s that ratio is barely greater than 1. For most schools it may be less than 1.
Having ED is not a magic bullet.It helps with yield without compromising quality only if the college has a strong brand
^Surelyhuman I think you make a fair point.
Please note that Brown had 4,230 ED applicants this year for a class of approximately 1,575 which equates to a 2.69:1 ratio.
Brown experienced a 20% surge in ED applications this year largely attributed to “The Brown Promise” to fully replace loans with grants. This initiative was in part designed to allow Brown to compete during ED round.
@Nocreativity1 Thank you for that update. I used 2022 numbers to calculate the ratio because both ED applications and incoming class sizes were available more readily for that year. I also did not include Stanford, because they don’t release those numbers anymore, but arguably they have the strongest ratio of around 4.6:1 based on old numbers. They could be as high as 5:1 this year
I think your update actually makes my point about this “Commitment ratio”. This year Brown was able to convince more applicants to make a binding commitment to it because of the “Brown Promise” which made Brown’s brand more attractive to applicants. Same thing happened with Rice this year. It will be interesting to see if this becomes a new normal for Brown and Rice in the coming years.
@surelyhuman , this kind of thing does go below the top 20 though. NYU received 14k ED applications for an expected class intake of around 6500 for the class of 2023. Not sure about others in that tier.
Based on 2022 numbers, here is the “Commitment ratio” (# of ED/SCEA apps/Incoming Class size) for a few more schools
Northwestern: 2.09
JHU: 1.54
Middlebury: 0.92
Rice 1.99
WashU 1.02
Wesleyan 0.88
Emory (College) 1.11
Emory (Oxford) 1.66
Hamilton 1.34
These are the ones I could find.
My feeling is that while Total number of apps, Yield rate and Admit rates can be gamed by colleges, it is hard to game the “Commitment Ratio”. A College’s class size is relatively fixed, and at the end of the day the College’s “overall attractiveness” in a marketplace with many similar options will determine the number of ED/SCEA applicants.
If a College reports a high yield rate but has a low Commitment ratio, you can deduce a few things about how their admission process works. Usually though, if you have a low commitment ratio, it is very hard to get a good yield rate without compromising the quality of enrolled students (using test scores as a rough proxy for measuring quality)
So a high commitment rate, high median test scores combined with high yield rate, tells you that this college is very popular
Commitment ratio can be influenced by the perceived or real advantage of applying ED/SCEA over RD for any specific school which opens a window for “gaming”
The advantage is real, not perceived. But most people can’t afford to apply EDs even if they are very committed to a specific school so the numbers are meaningless.
For class of 2022, Penn has 7074 ED applicants while the total number of applicants is 44482. The class size is 2445. 53.7% of class filled by early apps. Early apps account for 15.9% of total apps. Penn has the highest % of class filled by early apps in Ivies.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, Brown has the lowest % of the class filled by early apps. For class of 2022, Brown has 3502 ED applicants while the total number of applicants is 35438. The class size is 1665. 44.3% of class filled by early apps. Early apps account for 9.9% of total apps.
Finance is number one factor which has been ignored in the “commitment ratio” argument. IMHO, commitment ratio is a 曲論 (http://www.romajidesu.com/dictionary/meaning-of-%E6%9B%B2%E8%AB%96.html) in Japanese. But it is a good one.
Comparing SCEA to ED to EA to 80%EA/ED/ED2 schools is like comparing apple with orange or banana.
Of course, some colleges do not have ED at all.