I’m still trying to understand the mathematics behind the lower EA admittance. I certainly understand how lowering EA admittance can boost yield. You avoid admitting students you’d love to have but who really haven’t shown they want you and are not going to accept.
But why does it help with stated goal of reducing overall admission? How does it better help you control your admission numbers?
Understand that this question does not arise out of any sense of feeling frustrated or upset (my daughter had the good fortune to be admitted EA.) But as someone who is doing some volunteer work in helping others get admitted I’d like to fully understand the mathematics behind it.
Here’s what I mean, the mathematics definitely work for the goal of increasing yield. Let’s say there are 100 students who apply EA. You normally admit about 50, but many of those you have admitted in the past are students who haven’t demonstrated interest but have high scores. Some of those, lets say 20, may by the time of EA admission have been admitted to their dream school. If deferred these kids aren’t going to send a “burning interest” e-mail and you never lower your yield by admitting them. So by not admitting those 20 right away you protect your yield. Makes sense. You’ve admitted high ranking kids who have clearly shown interest and kids whose scores/grades indicate that Michigan may be the best school they are going to get into and who have demonstrated why they’d be a great addition to campus.
But I can’t figure out how it helps with lower admission overall. If you’d admitted those 20, they wouldn’t come and thus wouldn’t be part of the over-enrollment problem. So…can someone fully explain. @Alexandre, you seem particularly attuned to Michigan admissions as well as having a very good head for logic.
I think it is probably more about yield prediction than yield protection. By deferring many “qualified” candidates in EA Michigan might be hoping to predict the number of candidates who will accept if offered in RD. I think this is a better than ED for both the students and the college, just need to put up with some anxiety for a few months. Maybe they tried to alleviate the anxiety by sending two types of deferral letters.
Just speculating, I am assuming Michigan is not evil
I think that’s about right. The admissions office’s big problem is that they are chronically over enrolled (a great issue, btw, compared to most Midwestern schools), and the faculty is yelping about it. Working backward from recent yield, they need to cut the overall number of acceptances by about 1,000 this year. Secondarily, the EA process was out of hand, and UM was handing out early two-thirds of its offers before seeing half the applicant pool.
Cutting back EA acceptances puts them on target for lower overall totals and rebalances EA with RD. If it also has the longer term effect of discouraging kids who aren’t that serious about UM from throwing in an application, even if that stabilizes or slightly reduces app numbers, that will probably be healthy for the institution.
Admissions not only has the availability of stats on the expected yield but the yield on EA and the timing of EA acceptances. Therefore, they can see if the quick (1st 60 days) acceptance/yield of EA applicants is trending up or down and then proceed cautiously on accepting more. No doubt, Admissions underestimated the yield improvement last year (and the year before) and that resulted in the overenrollment.
Also, they do want to accept those with high stats that are not accepted ED elsewhere and show some interest. I bet there is a round of acceptances to those applicants in January; possibly larger than normal.
Now, I do agree with those that think the overall reduction in EA acceptances was primarily driven for yield protection.
