I was told by someone on the inside at admissions that Stanford has decided not to publish the yield. I heard it was a record high. I will not repeat the exact percentage I heard since I cannot confirm it.
If this is true, I commend Stanford admissions for not fueling the race war for yield supremacy. I suppose the exact percentage will make its way public in the common data set numbers.
Valid yield figures will not exist until after the semester starts and they count all who actually showed up. However, unless Stanford is lying publicly, its expected yield for this year is about 80% and maybe little higher. Last year yield was also 80%, which is determinable from its common data set so this year should be comparable. I have not heard about Stanford now refusing to provide information called for in the common data set. I do not see the world changing if a college with a known very high yield now declares it won’t tell anybody what it is anymore. Moreover, I do not believe any public service is done when any college decides to conceal information from the public. If Stanford is going to be hiding figures, I hope it is not because it wants to keep things secret so it can avoid in the future class action lawsuits like one that has been filed against Harvard accusing it of reverse discrimination based on its publicly available admission and yield figures.
It will be clear what the yield is from the common data set. I am sure Stanford will provide a common data set. It is not about “refusing to provide information”. I assume you have an agenda when you make false accusations like this. It is about over the top hype you see from many elite schools in bragging about their yield.
I think it is fine not to announce anything now. As noted above, you don’t know for sure until the kids show up. Why announce a number now and have to revise it down later? Could be embarrassing. We thought we beat Harvard but now we realize we didn’t.
Speaking of the Common Data Set, does anyone know where Harvard’s is for 2015-2016? I can find other school’s but not Harvard’s. Thanks.
Apparently, someone in admissions mentioned that yield this year was around 81%. I would have thought it was at least 85% based upon the total number of admits and the number of incoming stidents they said they sent books to which included transfers. 81% again this year is still quite extraordinary though.
from Stanford’s website: http://admission.stanford.edu/basics/selection/profile.html
82.7 %
http://news.stanford.edu/2016/03/25/admit-admission-announce-032516/
Since they originally admitted 2063, looks like they accepted 51 off the waitlist.
The yield off the original numbers (1699/2063) is 82.35%
Admit Rate for Class of 2020:
Stanford 4.80%
Harvard 5.39%
Yield Rate for Class of 2020:
Stanford 82.78%
Harvard 79.15%
https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics
@texaspg we don’t know the yield for the waitlist - at least of all 51 waitlist admits may not have all enrolled. So the yield before waitlist could be little higher than 82.35%.
@ewho - they don’t usually tell us how many they offered it to get the 51 which is why they just updated the admissions to reflect 2114 and the admit rate to 4.8% from 4.7%.
Most schools play with the waitlists in order to improve their admit rates. Some of them are admitting 200 to 400 students off the waitlists.
What I meant was that the
1750-51=1699
may not be correct due to the yield of waitlist admission may not be 100%
Public Service? LOL.
What other private businesses discloses all their information to the public as a public service?
Do you know how many people have not ordered an iPhone after pre-ordering one?
Do you know how many people watched the 2nd season of Friends on Netflix?
If you got accepted, you should decide to attend based on what the program offers, your financial situation, your alternatives. Requiring knowing historical yields to make a decision is just condoning the lemming factor rather than the fit factor.
If people didn’t get accepted, there is even less rationale to expect the data as a “public service”
The entitlement attitude of “I want this data” is just really amusing.
Doesn’t the admits and acceptances include how many were accepted and opted to accept off the waitlist?
In other words, the yield is based on the total people accepted (including the waitlist) and the total people who opted in.
I believe that they offered the admission to the waitlist applicants and gave them time like a week to make decisons. It is like regular admission and people can still turn it down.
The yield of waitlist admission should be higher than the regular admission, but it does not seem the case in this year. If less than 51 accepted the offer, the normal admission yield is close to 83%.
Regardless of the waitlist yield, it is safe to say that Stanford has had the highest yield out of all top schools this year. I wonder when USNews will finally give Stanford a rightfully deserved top 3 place. Getting ranked the same as Columbia or Chicago and below Yale is just inaccurate.
What @texaspg tried to figure out was that under normal situation (without playing the waitlist trick) what could the yield be.
What can be said is that had stanford accepted more students this year and did not have to use waitlist, it’s yield would have been at least 82.35%.
Sorry to be too technical on this and confuse everyone.
Would it matter whether it is 82.3 or 83? It is a ridiculously high number when it crosses 80%.
It means Stanford keeps accepting fewer and fewer people in order to reach their target matriculant size.
On a side note, it would be wrong for someone to choose college because the yield is very high there. OTOH, the yield is very high mainly because the matriculants as well as applicants believe it is the best college for them.
Haha, you started this.
It probably matters to stanford admission people. Now, they have a better idea what to do next year, I hope.
Admission is a very complex issue. Hopefully the feedbacks to them from here can be useful.
That is,
Without using waitlist, they can achieve the same yield.
As I read somewhere before that stanford does not really enjoy the trouble of using waitlist. So, the results of this year could give them a better idea of how to handle this next year.
i believe that admissions directors are judged by their schools largely on the basis of simply summary statistics: admit rate, yield rate, average SAT, number of URM, etc. No one monitors these people on the individual file level (as a professor at Dartmouth who was on the admissions committee for many years told me).
I think all schools–other than Caltech–play games to some extent. They have an incentive to do so given how they are judged. For instance, Harvard is notorious for encouraging kids to apply who have no chance at admissions. Why? It lowers their admit rate. Another game that schools play is with early decisions, which are binding, as opposed to early action, which is not. REA is a hybrid. Did you know that over half of Penn’s incoming class is EA? That’s one way to decrease your admit rate and increase your yield rate!
http://www.admissions.upenn.edu/apply/whatpennlooksfor/incoming-class-profile
To Stanford’s credit, they seem to play this game a little less than other schools. (Again, Caltech is the outlier.) In particular, other top schools seem to use the waitlist more than Stanford. There has been a discussion of what the yield rate is with kids offered from the waitlist. I don’t think you will ever see this data, although you can rest assured that all of the admissions offices have them. My guess is that the yield is close to 100%. An admissions office first calls the guidance counselor and says, “Harvard calling. We are thinking about offering Sally admissions off the waitlist. Do you think she would be interested?” If Sally has moved on, say to Yale, the counselor is likely to say no (although in that case why is Sally even on the waitlist). More likely she will say, “Sally really wants to attend Harvard.” She has probably told Sally to write a note to the Harvard admissions staff to that effect. Hence, for a variety of reasons, the yield rate is likely to be very high among those coming off the waitlist. I would not be surprised if some years it was 100%.
It looks like Stanford took 51 off of the waitlist this year. Harvard with a slightly smaller class took 75 off the waitlist. (In prior years, Stanford took no one off the waitlist while Harvard took many.) On the margin, that makes Stanford yield rate even more impressive.
“An admissions office first calls the guidance counselor and says, “Harvard calling. We are thinking about offering Sally admissions off the waitlist. Do you think she would be interested?” If Sally has moved on, say to Yale, the counselor is likely to say no (although in that case why is Sally even on the waitlist)”
Lol! Guidance counselors with a couple of hundred kids assigned to them, who are dealing with truancy, kids in crisis, etc don’t even remotely have the bandwidth to even know that Sally applied to Harvard and Yale, much less know which one she prefers. But go ahead, pretend that most GCs in this country have the luxury.