So Few Schools With >75% Yield - Lots OF People Reject Ivies?

Applying to College
121

One thing that should be noted is that the very act of having ED/SCEA will most likely pull a College’s RD yield lower because now it has removed interested/ committed applicants who would have otherwise been in the RD pile through self selective segmentation and they are now in the binding/early pile. The applicants left in the RD pile are by definition less committed.

A classic example of this because it happened so recently is UChicago. Before going the ED route Chicago had a lot of students who were interested in it in both it’s EA and RD rounds. Their overall yield was around 63% but their RD yield was definitely higher than what it is now. The very act of introducing ED has lowered Chicago’s RD yield because a certain percentage of interested applicants now have moved into the binding rounds leaving the RD pool with a larger percentage of uncommitted applicants

I speculate that the more rounds of ED a college has, the lower it’s RD yield will get. So I fully expect that RD round yield at ED2 schools like Chicago, Vanderbilt, WashU, NYU etc will be lower than peer schools that don’t have an ED2 round. This then means that these schools will start filling more seats through their binding rounds to get the class they need or want

So as a thought experiment, if a college decides to have five ED rounds with deadlines in Nov, Dec, Jan, Feb and March, their RD yield will be truly pathetic.

That doesn’t really say anything about the college’s competing capability as much as it says about the fact that it has successfully extracted every interested candidate out of it’s RD pool through effective applicant segmentation.

122

^ Surelyhuman- As long as we are talking theoreticals they could add a final “late” ED round in April for all those kids who’s next best option would be UC. They in theory would get a large number of applicants who would embrace an improvement over their prevailing best option. In this scenario UC could get yield up to 100% by only allowing candidates to a progress series of ED rounds. Absursd, theoretical and effective if undertaken by a desirable school like UC but never happen.

123

“think they are looking for the best academics, but in fact they are looking for future leaders in their fields.” Not. Actually, neither is sufficient.

You get iffy, imo, when you insist on a phrase like yield protection, as if the top 20 are wringing their hands. What if you just called it yield (building the class) and spreading the workload over 5 months instead of 10 weeks? You start with RD and simply allow a proportion to jump ahead who say they aren’t shopping, can decide now, if the details are right.

When CC talks of emotions, that’s the kid side. Adcoms are far more rational.

As for wealth, sorry, it’s not what gets you in. Nor is legacy alone.

And top 50? Seriously? Call it top 20. No offense intended but huge difference between ‘most competitive’ and simply ‘competitive.’

124

@lookingforward
“You get iffy, imo, when you insist on a phrase like yield protection, as if the top 20 are wringing their hands. What if you just called it yield (building the class) and spreading the workload over 5 months instead of 10 weeks? You start with RD and simply allow a proportion to jump ahead who say they aren’t shopping…”

If you don’t care about yield you could easily achieve this goal by EA plus RD, not SCEA. You just need to admit a few more, risk losing a few, but at the end of the day you would probably still get the same committed pool with strong, talented and diverse students.

125

@lookingforward “And top 50? Seriously? Call it top 20. No offense intended but huge difference between ‘most competitive’ and simply 'competitive.”

Completely agree. In fact I think it is an even more rarified group than top 20. There are roughly 12 schools that have or will have this year sub 20% early round and sub 6% RD round acceptance rates.

No particular order:
Harvard
Yale
Princeton
Columbia
Brown
Dartmouth
Penn
Duke
Chicago
MIT
Caltech
Stanford
*and yes fans of other schools will debate the point but the numbers are the numbers (notable exception Georgetown who to their credit has stayed true to their own unique approach).

To Lookingforward’s point these schools have the luxury of being able to approach the entire process “rationally” with an end goal of building a portfolio of talents, skills and scores across a community of students that fits the unique character of each institution. We as parents, students, (any non AO professional) assumes emotions that just don’t exist in the actual decision making process at these super elite schools. It tends to feel random but each school I believe is frighteningly deliberate in their approach to protecting and reinforcing their schools culture. You may choose to disagree with the culture they want, be rest assured they are achieving their desired result. These twelve hold all the cards in many ways given roughly 18-20 kids applying for each spot.

Below these 12 compromises are made to varying degree out of necessity, clearly less so at those close to this level of exclusivity.

Rant over?

126

I personally feel that any school that admits from a wait list, defacto has an additional ED round, because that is what the waitlist really is. You say that you are still interested. If they are interested, they call you. If you give them a commitment, they take you off the list and either admit you for the same year or gap year. If you hedge and say maybe, you are most likely not getting the offer. It is really an ED round.

127

@Nocreativity1

As I explained #125, most elite schools have this “Late ED round”, not just UChicago. its called the wait list. IMO, the waitlist is essentially a “late ED round”. Most colleges engage in this behavior.

My main point though is that every additional ED round a college introduces will lower their RD yield, because it will extract more and more interested applicants out of the RD pool. This is why I think looking at the yield rate is meaningless. I therefore prefer looking at the Commitment ratio as a better metric to get a sense of which schools are popular.

128

^ @surelyhuman I was responding to your response; “So as a thought experiment, if a college decides to have five ED rounds with deadlines in Nov, Dec, Jan, Feb and March, their RD yield will be truly pathetic.” in #120. You had brought up UC.

I was not trying to disparage Chicago in any way. To the contrary I was extending your theoretical and saying only a highly sought after school like UC had the leverage to do so.

In terms of waiting list I agree in theory but it only benefits yield after a rejected offer so still lowers yield.

129

The four SCEA schools certainly increase their respective yields by reducing the chances of their admits to be accepted by their competitors. Their competitors are the other SCEA schools and EA schools such as MIT/Caltech in the regular round. ED schools are not their competitors for those applicants who chose to apply SCEA, rather than ED. Most SCEA applicants choose their SCEA school because it’s their first choice.

The ED schools increase their yields much more dramatically by virtually eliminating the chances of their admits to be accepted by their competitors. Some ED applicants choose their ED school because it’s their first choice, but many others choose it not because it’s their first choice but because of the increased chance of acceptance.

130

@Nocreativity1 No issues. BTW, even if you were trying to disparage a school, its your right do do so. I am personally against the concept of anthropomorphizing schools and treating them like family :slight_smile: They are just institutions!

131

@1NJParent Do you have any data to back your claim that more ED than SCEA applicants apply early to maximize their acceptance chances rather than simply prefering their school?

132

@ccdad99 There’re data that show cross admits favor Harvard over Columbia, for example. Some Columbia applicants favor Columbia because of its location, etc. Many other Columbia applicants would clearly favor Harvard if they think they have equal chances of acceptance at Harvard. Obviously, they’re more than content with Columbia, and in fact Columbia is their first choice among all ED schools. They’re giving up their chances at Harvard (or other SCEA/EA schools) to increase their chance at Columbia.

133

@Nocreativity1 Notice that Caltech is probably unique among the top schools in having yield less than 50%, because they lose a lot of kids to MIT and Stanford. They’re probably just too small to get enough students ED or SCEA, but this certainly adds to their image of not playing the games others play.

134

@1NJParent
“Many other Columbia applicants would clearly favor Harvard if they think they have equal chances of acceptance at Harvard. ”

Sounds reasonable, but not direct evidence to back exactly what you are claiming. Cross admit data has a similar flaw. Cross admit students may or may not represent the majority of those who choose ED or SCEA.

135

@ccdad99 Let’s look at it another way. If an ED school think it’s as desirable as a SCEA school, why wouldn’t it offer SCEA instead of ED? It obviously thinks (correctly) that it wouldn’t be able to compete and would lose a lot of their early applicants to SCEA schools. ED schools are not dumb.

136

How many schools actually offer SCEA?

137

@1NJParent I think this is a valid point and I have been wondering about this myself. My guess is they may experience a few points of drop in their yield and maybe a slight bump in their acceptance rate. It is an arms race and probably even the slightest movement in these may be considered as “failure”. Who knows. On a similar note, if the SCEA schools are only worried about the other three SCEA schools, why don’t they place their restriction on only applications to four lettered early application schools?

138

I don’t understand this argument. A student can only apply to one school whether it’s SCEA or ED, from a student perspective the “non compete” aspect is the same.

ED schools are always clear that students should only apply if the school is first choice. If the student decides to be “strategic” and apply somewhere not first choice to increase acceptance chances, that’s on the student. Of course by saying that you’re also admitting that the student does indeed get a quid pro quo for the restriction of ED.

139

We can argue all day about which policy favors yield more for which school etc, but I really don’t understand this obsession with yield which apparently the best of the best also seem to have. With so many more qualified applicants for each of the spots they offer, surely they can afford to lose many more without compromising anything. I wonder if there is anything we parents can do so they stop playing games.

140

1NJParent, about “The four SCEA schools certainly increase their respective yields by reducing the chances of their admits to be accepted by their competitors. Their competitors are the other SCEA schools and EA schools such as MIT/Caltech in the regular round. ED schools are not their competitors for those applicants who chose to apply SCEA, rather than ED. Most SCEA applicants choose their SCEA school because it’s their first choice.”

I’ve been thinking about this comment and it seems off.

If the statement were true, you’d expect clear yield rate differentiation between the SCEA schools and those that allow EA with no restrictions right? And you don’t really get that. Harvard is higher than MIT but not appreciably so. In fact, I’d argue the SCEA for those schools increases the yield for the other highly ranked schools. The rational you suggest does not make a lot of sense to me although I could be missing something in terms of my logic.

Seems like the result is the opposite of what you suggest. I’d agree with you if the SCEA schools were a different set of schools. But let’s face it, Harvard just does not have to worry too much about other schools stealing their admits. It’s unlikely that they use SCEA as yield protection.

But, most successful applicants to Harvard could easily gobble up EA slots, taking them from applicants to other highly ranked schools and adding only noise to the application process for the other schools. So I think SCEA helps the yield of the other schools. But I don’t think the rationale for Harvard is altruistic. Not being SCEA but EA could result in an overload of work for the Harvard AdCons. Many more students, many without a shot, might still be willing to check off Harvard along with other EA schools causing a large rise in applications but not an improvement in their pool. Harvard would also have to contend with more legacy wanna-bees (and particularly the parents of the wanna-bees) who know that their record falls too short for legacy status to be likely but who have a good chance at other good private schools. If Harvard allowed unrestricted early action, the number of such people applying would shoot up and they’d have to deal with the parents. (And there is a difference between knowing your kid should’t apply due to his/her academic record and having to contend with an actual rejection of your kid from your alma mater). But with SCEA most (but not all) would choose to apply early to a place they had a better shot at.

MIT, on the other hand, does not have to worry about that problem. They don’t use the Common App and they don’t do legacy. So they have a higher proportion of genuinely competitive students who go out of their way to apply to MIT. Even with EA, MIT doesn’t need to cull from a much larger pool of students who have no genuine interest but decided to give it a shot. All their applicants put in a lot of work to apply, so there are simply fewer frivolous applicants to deal with.

lastly, EA rather than ED for MIT is probably not about MIT not thinking it can compete with other schools but it would be the antithesis of some core values of MIT. (MIT does not even require a deposit with the commitment to accept the offer to attend-so students can opt out without losing money.)

Obviously this is just my speculation but it makes the most sense to me about the choice for SCEA and EA for these schools.