<p>Every university has a finite capacity - that is not just for dorm space but also for classrooms - numbers of seats across all the rooms, professors and grad assistants to handle classes, etc. The admissions group of every university wants to keep the university at capacity; not overloaded, nor leaving resources wasted.</p>
<p>They also know that not every accepted student will matriculate. Some will choose other schools, a few will fail to meet the conditions of acceptance, some decide to do other things rather than attend college . . .</p>
<p>Here is the logic, using some totally invented numbers to illustrate the point:</p>
<p>University capacity is 50,000 and is currently full.</p>
<p>10,000 will graduate this Spring and another 500 over the summer. In addition, 500 transfer out or drop out. That would leave the campus population at 39,000 in Fall. Goal - matriculate 11,000 students.</p>
<p>However, more students will graduate in Fall - by the end of Fall, perhaps 2,800 are set up to graduate and another 200 will leave for various reasons. That means another 3,000 can be handled in Spring. </p>
<p>Thus, plan to accept enough applications to yield 11,000 walking onto campus in Fall and other 3,000 entering in Spring. This is why Cal offers spring admissions. Otherwise, they would have open space being wasted every spring and summer (or overcrowd the campus creating problems for everybody in the Fall). </p>
<p>The dorms are not the critical constraint. They can handle some, but not all, of the spring admits in the area, if the classroom requirements are addressed by the Extension and not the campus space, thus they have a subset of the spring admit population they can service with the FPF program, until that classroom and staff resource is filled, the rest would take classes at home before arriving in spring. </p>
<p>PS - to get 11,000 entering in Fall and 3,000 more in Spring, you need to offer more than 11,000 + 3,000 yes decisions, to cover those that choose to go to Princeton or Pomona or UVa or whereever. The university tracks the historical patterns and knows fairly well what percentage or yield they will get on campus next year. If the yield is 50%, to make the math easy, then they would issue 22,000 Fall accepts and 6,000 Spring accepts. They use more granularity than this - OOS applicant yield might be 33%, thus offer 3X the desired OOS population, while in-state might be 66% in general and 75% from specific areas. Adjust the acceptances DOWN for those areas with high historical yields. Spring yield different from Fall yield, CoE yield different than L&S yield . …</p>