According to the Post article cited above, ED can still be an okay option for students with financial need, as they may still get enough money to afford their ED school. (They might have gotten more money someplace else, but if they get into a great school for something they can afford, that might be fine.) For those who need some merit to, say, bring the COA down to $34K (comparable with in-state public), is it at all advisable to do ED? You can still reject the ED school if the financial aid package doesn’t work out for you, right? But you’ve just burned your chances of getting in RD to that particular school. Does applying ED elsewhere and rejecting that school have any impact on later getting into in-state selective public?
Obviously more of an issue in sparsely populated areas. State policies (sometimes in the distant past) in terms of locating state universities and programs of interest at various state universities also has an effect.
Besides athletes, ED seats are also taken by Questbridge candidates and legacies. I suspect that at least some schools try to lock in additional appealing candidates that fulfill their desired class attributes since they don’t know they are going to get kids to fill that slot in RD, since all the RD acceptances for that slot can turn them down. As an example, if you’re a great candidate from South Dakota and apply ED, a school might be more likely to accept that kid than wait to see who else applies from South Dakota during the RD round. Continuing on my pure speculation, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a higher percentage of URM and first generation acceptances in the ED round than the RD round. It would be fascinating to see a breakdown of the ED acceptances per school so kids can see what their real chances of acceptance are, based on what bucket they are in on the ED round and in the RD round.
Here’s where my real area of concern is, I think unhooked or OR (either based on race or geography) candidates are flocking to ED thinking that this gives them a significant advantage. At some schools it will. At some schools it won’t. Since they only have 1 shot at ED, they need to use this shot wisely. And maybe a kid won’t want to commit to ED to his/her favorite school if his/her chances of acceptance only increase slightly because the ED boost is significantly smaller for his bucket than the ED stats appear on their face.
Is this true? Can you withdraw if you simply decide that its not affordable or is it based on your EFC or something else? I have no idea how withdrawal works.
If our process can be useful to some of the above parents who mentioned they are full pay, without full pay resources – precisely where we found ourselves several years ago – let me review our process.
By spring of my LAC kid’s junior year, we realized we could manage about $40k or so, but not more, as a full pay family, so needed substantial merit award. NESCACs and schools like Vassar, Haverford etc. came off the list as we focused on merit.
As a result, his list was mostly safeties with a few matches. His application highlighted the qualities he would contribute to campus, and he visited, interviewed, sat in on class, communicated with his admissions officer etc., “showing the love” so that they knew he was serious about his interest. Many of them had EA, which meant he had a handful of acceptances by mid-Dec of senior year. He then applied ED2 elsewhere, and we had detailed conversations with his admissions officer about the level of merit aid expected. As long as it came out to the minimum they predicted, we knew we could make it work, though I had some middle of the night worry about what if we didn’t get that minimum merit.
The challenge initially was that kid (and his parents) would have to be comfortable and proud of his acceptances, when surrounded by super achieving, Ivy/top 20 bound friends (and their intense parents). Once we got past that, it really was quite smooth, and kid was proud of his offers and loves his school.
Sorry, but this whole college admissions exercise is a game. I will state some observations I have made and ask more knowledgeable and qualified parties to correct me if I am wrong.
Colleges are businesses, pure and simple. They are not altruistic and well meaning. How else can you explain a good but not great school like Lehigh rejecting 68% of a group of kids that is qualified for admission?
They have one overarching goal and that is to grow their balance sheets (endowment) and their income statements (tuition plus grants).
They have devised ingenious methods (ED) to insure that they get the most full paying students on campus as possible, with no negotiating power. Why would anyone do ED and lose all negotiating power on price? Schools couple this practice with allowing the most need based students that they can pay for with government grants and their tax free endowments. In other words, you over taxed middle class Americans are subsidizing schools to exclude your kids to benefit the very wealthy and the very poor.
If you are very wealthy - the system is awesome. If you are like the vast majority of Americans … not so much.
That’s my two cents.
“Is this true? Can you withdraw if you simply decide that its not affordable or is it based on your EFC or something else? I have no idea how withdrawal works.”
Sure that’s true.
What is the college going to do? Sue the family to force the kid to attend a school that the family can’t afford? Which will then force the family into bankruptcy? Which will then force the kid to withdraw anyway?
Two things to keep in mind. First, the big ED schools tend to be the small merit money schools. Second, you only get one ED bullet to shoot.
So if you want to roll the dice on getting the small available merit money at Vandy or WUSTL or Duke or JHU, go for it. But it probably is not going to work out. Which means (even if your kid is admitted) you got nothing from your one magic bullet.
Also, to get merit at such a selective school, you are going to have to be a WAY above average applicant. The kind of applicant who would be in the top 5-10% of the enrolled students and top 1% of applicants. Thus, the kind of kid who can buck the long odds of RD. One of my kids was just that situation – scored a big merit schollie in RD from a top 20 school.
So it really doesn’t make all that much sense to apply ED unless you can full pay or make it work on the indicated EFC. Your kid can never attend a school unless they get admitted AND you can pay for it both.
Also, you wonder why the school would be incented to give out those schollies to ED kids who look like they will enroll without the extra merit schollie inducement. Although the schools do typically say they consider ED applicants for merit.
To put a finer point on Lehigh’s admissions stats: Per Lehigh’s most recent Common Data Set, its overall admit rate for the class entering in the fall of 2017 was 25.2% (3489 admitted out of 13,871 applicants) and its overall yield was 35.4% (1234 enrolled out of 3489 admitted).
Its ED admit rate was 59.9% (669 admitted out of 1116 applying ED).
Subtracting the ED admits and applicant from the overall totals, that means its RD admit rate was 22.1% (2820 admitted out of 12,775 RD applicants). But note that this is only slightly below its overall admit rate (22.1% RD, 25.2% overall). That’s because the overwhelming majority of its applicants apply RD, so the admit rate for that group weighs much more heavily in its overall admit rate. Consequently, an applicant’s chances of being admitted RD are not too far off from what one might expect by looking at the overall admit rate.
But here’s the shocking part. Let’s assume Lehigh gets a 90% yield from its ED admits—the actual figure might be somewhat higher or somewhat lower, but it’s probably somewhere in that ballpark. A few ED admits will back out for financial reasons, a few might not matriculate due to illness, injury, or a change in plans, a few might decide to defer their admission for a year, etc., but because ED admits have signed a binding pledge to attend if admitted, the overwhelming majority will do so. So I think a 90% ED yield is as good a guess as any. On that assumption, it means their RD yield is only 22.4% (estimated 632 enrolled out of 2820 admitted RD, after subtracting the estimated ED enrolled and ED admits from the overall figures).
That’s a shockingly low yield. If I were Lehigh, I’d absolutely use ED to fill as much of the class as I possibly could with qualified applicants. Without it, the bottom would likely fall out of entering class stats. “Yield management,” you say? Well, yes, but there’s nothing pernicious about it. For a school like Lehigh it’s yield management in the interest of maintaining the quality of its student body and preserving its claim to any kind of upper-echelon academic status.
[Edited to correct a math error]
Is 18.1% that shockingly low?
Here are some frosh admission yield rates at other schools (no ED here):
19% UC San Diego
19% UC Davis
17% UC Santa Barbara
It may not be much different than the yield at other schools, but it’s a tough, tough number for all of them to work with. Colleges are trying to fill their open places, but a small miscalculation or misestimate in yield can have disastrous results. Wasn’t it a UC (think it might have been Irvine?) that had an unexpected increase of 1% point in yield causing their class to be 800 students too full? (Then they made the problem worse by attempting to whittle down the oversubscribed class by revoking offers over trivial matters that hadn’t ever been grounds for revocation in the past…)
Colleges aren’t crazy or being mean to want to have a good understanding of how many students will be showing up in the fall. If ED yields 90% and RD 18%, it’s no mystery why colleges would utilize ED.
18% is not a shockingly low yield. With kids applying to 10+ schools (this year seems worse than ever for this) yields HAVE to come down everywhere (unless schools go increasingly to ED - which many are). Yield doesn’t factor into rankings. Who cares.
Why don’t more colleges offer Single Choice Early Action? It appears that only a few highly selective schools offer this. This could be a way of the school knowing a student is interested, without the financial aid risk.
If you want to look at the problems poor yield management can cause, look at the issues Oberlin is facing this year with their budget.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/12/12/oberlin-faces-budget-crunch-due-missed-enrollment-targets
I’d speculate that ED yield is closer to 95-98% at schools of this caliber.
Here’s another dirty little secret about ED: it helps schools manage their FA budgets. Many students with substantial need avoid ED because they want to compare FA offers from multiple schools. Consequently, ED applicants, ED admits, and ED matriculants tend to skew wealthier.
According to Lehigh’s most recent CDS, 53% of its entering class in 2017 were full-pay—or at least got no need-based aid. About 4.5% of entering freshmen got merit aid, though some of these may also have received need-based FA, and 4.9% received athletic scholarships. Most of those who did get need-based aid were heavily subsidized by the school, with an average FA award of $46,421.
Lehigh is not a poor school, but it’s not exactly a wealthy one, either. Its endowment of $1.278 billion may sound impressive, but that breaks down to $182K per student. At a standard endowment payout rate of 5%, that means its endowment produces about $9,100 per student annually. So to make the generous FA wards it makes, Lehigh needs a lot of full-pay students, both to limit the number of need-based FA awards, and to generate revenue that can be used to cross-subsidize those with need. I’m not saying this is the prime motive behind ED, but I do think ED plays a not insignificant role in keeping the institution solvent by skewing the entering class more affluent.
I’d guess those UC yield rates are so low because most applicants apply to all (well, top 5) UCs, not knowing where they’ll get it. Just about every kid I know who applied to UCs applied to all except Merced and Riverside. Add in the OOS kids who ‘dream about going to college in California’ and don’t know they’ll get no aid from UCs until after they apply and I’m not surprised the yield is so low.
@doschicos I’m now thoroughly confused. If Oberlin, a top rate selective school, had such a poor yield, why didn’t they simply take more kids off the wait list?
They took 124 which is huge for a college of Oberlin’s size. See C2 in the CDS: http://www2.oberlin.edu/instres/irhome/www/cds/2017/
My speculation would be that others who stayed on the waitlist had already moved on to other choices and that at some point the college starts considering other things like how bringing kids lower down in the pecking order would affect stats or that the remaining waitlist students would need too much aid to help with balancing the budget.
@ucbalumnus, I don’t think the UCs are a relevant comparison group. As I understand it, applicants use a single application to apply to any or all UCs, so for the Berkeley or UCLA-bound, it’s pretty costless to also apply to Davis, Santa Barbara, etc.—it’s just a matter of ticking off that box on an application you’ve already filled out. This probably inflates the number of applicants to Davis, Santa Barbara, etc. with applications from many who have little or no interest in actually attending.
I think most public flagships have considerably higher yields. At Wisconsin it’s 35.4%, Ohio State 31.4%. Michigan 42.9%.
I don’t have time to do all the calculations, but I also think Lehigh’s RD yield is probably low in comparison to its Patriot League peers. At Colgate, for example, I calculate RD yield to be 42.1%, with an overall yield of 54.9%—both figures considerably higher than Lehigh.
Yes, it was UCI that had a greater yield than expected. 21% in 2017.
Yield matters a great deal to admissions officers who are trying to fill a class with qualified students. The lower the yield, the more students they need to admit, which in turn affects the admit rate (this does count in US News rankings, albeit only a little, but I don’t think that’s the primary concern of the admissions office) and it may require them to dig deeper into the applicant pool and potentially take a greater number of less qualified applicants (this affects not only rankings but also possibly the quality of the academic experience for those who do attend, which the admissions office cares about a great deal). And from a purely administrative standpoint, it’s easier to shape the overall class with the characteristics you want if you’ve already got a large core group safely in the fold through ED, so you can assess the strengths and deficiencies of that core group and work from there. Also, a large ED crop gives you a core group who have already declared this school to be their #1 choice and presumably will be happy to be there. A low yield among RD admits indicates that many are using it as their 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or nth choice, so even among those who do enroll, there may be many who do so only reluctantly, because they got shut out of schools they would have preferred. You don’t want to fill an entire class with people wishing they were somewhere else. ED is pretty efficient means of identifying and landing those who really love the school from the get-go.
The original premise of this post is correct- no matter how strong your child’s “stats” and overall application, there are absolutely no guarantees at highly selective schools, Lehigh included. I used to do alumni interviews for Cornell and the admissions folks are looking for balance and fit with their incoming class. They want what they consider the “right balance” of international vs domestic students, representation from as many states as possible, and diversity. They look at intended major which is a big one which many people downplay. I can’t tell you the number of "pre meds"and CS majors I have talked to over the years and those students are going to have more competition for spots. I remember a stat a few years ago that 96% of applicants were academically qualified for Cornell. The acceptance rate last year was around 15% for regular decision. I would believe the same is true for Lehigh in terms of qualified applicants. Universities also tracks yield from high schools so if you go to a school were large number of students have turned down their acceptances, that will play into the decision as well. Demonstrated interest is also a big one. I believe one of the Lehigh stats I read was that one of the best predictors of students choosing to come to Lehigh was if they made an on campus visit. We made sure our daughter did a regional admissions day in our home state, the admissions interview, and toured campus. She also followed them on social media, etc… Yield definitely matters. We told our daughter to not take any college decision personally, apply to a wide range of schools, and to remember that no matter where she ends up, working hard will yield her the results she wants in terms of grad school/career. You are not definite by where you graduated! Good luck to all!