<p>Notre Dame has a higher yield than Cornell, UVA, Vandy, Dartmouth, Georgetown, Duke, UMich, Wash U, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Rice, and Berkeley. So what was the point again?</p>
<p>If you look at the new 2010, you’ll see that Harvard was bested by BYU. Neither cracked 80%. LSU and Michigan are tied with Cornell…oh and Bama and University of Illinios UC. Virginia Tech is tied with Duke. </p>
<p>Tufts faired better than Johns Hopkins and Northwestern. Samford has the same yield as Vandy. Yield cannot be looked at in a bubble, my friend.
[Most</a> Popular Schools: National Universities - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/best-colleges/2010/03/05/most-popular-schools-national-universities.html?PageNr=2]Most”>http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/best-colleges/2010/03/05/most-popular-schools-national-universities.html?PageNr=2)</p>
<p>Nice reference Ben. What one can clearly see by the USNWR ranking vs. their order of yield is that there is zero correlation between the two.</p>
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<p>i’d just like to throw out there that this nailed down my situation to a T.</p>
<p>What is a good working definition of “Tufts Syndrome”, please?</p>
<p>[Yield</a> protection - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yield_protection]Yield”>Yield protection - Wikipedia)
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<p>In this case, the example might be the reverse-- of the university accepting many qualified applicants who may be less likely to attend.</p>
<p>This was posted today in the “schools going to their wait list” thread, and was a response to someone asking what “cooking the books” meant (because posters feel that some of the top schools are manipulating the acceptances/wait list numbers)</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1064848242-post266.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1064848242-post266.html</a>
This is why yield is important.</p>
<p>But that is just one poster’s opinion. Not to say there are not a lot of others that feel the same, but I think it is becoming increasingly clear, as Ben’s post shows, that this is an outdated concept at best, if it ever was really valid. As Ben says, how can one explain Nebraska having a yield of 70%? Does that really make it a more desireable school than Columbia or Princeton? Certainly when everyone’s admission process was pretty much the same (no internet, everyone charged to apply, marketing was pretty much non-existant, etc.) perhaps it had some meaning. But given the state of the college application process today, I think both admissions % and yield are anachronisms. People are not “cooking the books”, they are simply using modern strategies to get the best students possible or, in the alternative, the best students for the kind of institution they want to be. Yield just seems to lose its meaning when students apply to 10-20 schools, get multiple admittances and everything just gets diluted, swamped in a sea of big numbers.</p>
<p>I think Tulane was just way out ahead of the curve in knowing that this was something to forget about, that it was a distraction from achieving bigger goals.</p>
<p>If it was just one person’s opinion,the schools wouldnt play with these numbers the way they do.</p>
<p>I think there is a much more generous explanation. I am not sure they are playing with numbers for the sake of making yield look better as much as they are trying to manage a very difficult situation with getting a quality class that is the right size within a fairly narrow range. I think it is completely remarkable they manage as well as they do, but the fact that so many of these schools are already taking from their waitlist tells me how difficult the job really is. To further the point about not manipulating the numbers for the sake of manipulation, USNWR doesn’t even use yield as part of the calculations any longer, and they can hardly move their ranking with admission rates since this is only 1.5% of the total calculation. So what is the point of manipulating numbers? If yield doesn’t affect rankings, and if there is no correlation to quality of the institution or, apparently, the reputation of a school based on its yield except to a diminishing number of people, then there is no reason to worry about it. People are going to look at many other factors before looking at something as far removed from quality as yield, such as average SAT scores and the like.</p>
<p>I guess I keep getting back to what should Tulane do if yield improvement were the primary goal? The only way to get yield up would be to reduce the number of people they accept, by not accepting (hopefully) the ones that would have refused Tulane anyway. Putting aside that this requires a sort of omniscience few admissions offices possess, it would be turning the very strategy they have precisely decided to use and have had proven success with 180 degrees. The whole point of their strategy, as far as I can see, is to exactly accept those people that are likely to get into schools ranked #1-30 or so, lure as many as possible to Tulane, and improve the class that way. (The stories one hears about Tulane waitlisting highly qualified applicants are far fewer than some other schools, and these are usually people that applied late, after it was obvious that Tulane was filling up already). However, since they cannot know which 300 or so of these students out of the 15,000 they accept using this strategy will actually come (and of course I am making up those numbers but they illustrate the point), they have to accept that the yield will be low in order to get those star students. Since Tulane does not have the reputation of an HYPS or a Chicago or Wash U or Duke, I just don’t see how they can have both high yield and get these students employing the same strategy, and since they have to sacrifice one or the other it is a no brainer.</p>
<p>Honestly, I have never heard a person or a prospective student say “I considered Tulane but their yield was so low I figured there must be something wrong with the place”. Maybe it happens, but I have never seen or heard it. I have heard people say “I was really surprised when I compared Tulane’s SAT scores to schools I always assumed were better.”</p>
<p>Finally, it does seem odd to hear that Tulane may have Tufts syndrome though. How can they be employing a low yield strategy by accepting all these stellar students that they know will refuse in large numbers and have Tufts syndrome? Aren’t those antithetical?</p>
<p>I think yield went out the window with the Common App. The old days of “one reach, one good fit, and one safety” are gone forever when the applicant can hit the SUBMIT button on the common app as many times as his Visa Card allows.</p>
<p>And let’s remember that Tulane doesn’t use the Common App. and still got that number of applications. I realize it’s a simple application, but every one of the 43,000 students had to sit down and fill it out. That’s 43,000 decisions to at least “see what happens with Tulane” and that’s impressive, especially in the age of the Common App.</p>
<p>The school on that list that really stands out in my mind is the Colorado School of Mines. It has a 20% yield. Explain that one-- I mean, I would assume poetry and drama majors probably don’t apply in huge numbers, and if any school in the country should be self-selecting it’s a College that teaches engineering on top of a mountain in Colorado. </p>
<p>Yet 4 out of 5 of the students who applied eventually chose to go elsewhere? How do you explain that and still have the concept of yield make any kind of sense?</p>
<p>Am off to a mtg- will have to read later. As I tried to clarify above, its sort of a reverse-Tufts syndrome – accepting many strong students, 83% of whom dont attend. Again, its an image issue, IMO. As others have said, yield is affected by lots of things (the religious schools like BYU have high yield b/c he students want to attend a Mormon school). Maybe schools should stop reporting yield, since its such an easily manipulated number. But I have heard people ask why the TU yield is so low-- and ask why dont more kids want to go there. </p>
<p>All I am saying is I’d love to se TU get its yield into the 20s. Maybe this year it will happen.</p>
<p>** and scorpio-- TU used to use the common app. Now they use the universal app. Same procedure (schools like Harvard and Duke use the Universal app. Maybe TU gets their cross applicants??) Why did TU stop using the common app? Anyone know
<a href=“Universal College Application”>Universal College Application;
<p>86 schools use the universal app. Heres the list <a href=“https://www.universalcollegeapp.com/CollegeRequirements.cfm[/url]”>https://www.universalcollegeapp.com/CollegeRequirements.cfm</a></p>
<p>Havard didn’t crack an 80 percent yield but Tulane couldn’t get to 15 percent. The fact that 86 out of ever 100 admitted applicants choose to go elsewhere does not reflect well on Tulane. The marketing gimmicks are an embarassment. So is the yield. </p>
<p>I am not trying to be rude but turning higher education into a sales pitch cheapens the product. People make fun of DeVry for the same reasons. Seriously, a couple years ago I had never heard of Tulane. Now it is marketed as aggressively as Enzyte.</p>
<p>44,000 apps x .235 acceptance rate = 10,340 accepted. 1,687 deposits/10,340 = 16.3% yield.</p>
<p>If Tulane had the same guaranteed financial aid deal that Harvard offers, they’d have a much higher yield. Now doubt about it. Thats apples and oranges.</p>
<p>SJUhawk-
No offense, but I’ve never heard of your school either. And hows your school’s yield? I cant find any info about the # of applications/number of acceptances on St. Joseph U’s website.</p>
<p>I don’t think it is a matter of guaranteed financial aid. Harvard had those kinds of numbers well before they came up with their new FA programs. HYPS are just in a different position entirely, that is why they don’t have to worry about the same issues as the schools from #10 or so on down. As the Harvard people have said, they could wipe out their entire accepted class, take the next 2,000 and not lose any quality. They enjoy a prestige that only a handful of others do, and that makes all the difference in acceptance rates and yield.</p>
<p>Let SJUHawk stay hung up on yield and marketing. Who cares? Apparently it is only embarassing to him.</p>
<p>I think you missed my point, FC. I dont disgree about Harvards yield. I was saying if TU’s FA/no loan offer was equal to Harvards (it isnt) the yield would be higher, We saw many posters here who were hoping for better FA packages and really wantted to come to TU, but simply couldnt manage the loan part.</p>
<p>Found this on CB website for SJU:
of the 82% admitted (yikes) whats the yield (not just the EA yield)??</p>
<p>Yes, but jym, at 1650+ enrollees, why would we want the yield higher? I really cannot talk about this any more, because I cannot say it any other way. We cannot get a higher yield without accepting fewer top students, and we cannot raise the quality of the student body if we don’t accept these top students. Yield is just meaningless today, or at least it should be. After all, SJUHawk is all hung up on it. That should tell you something.</p>
<p>From Princeton Review for SJU:</p>
<p>Total applicants: 6,520
Total applicants who are accepted: 5,370 (82.4%)
Total of accepted students who enroll: 1,188 (22% yield)</p>
<p>Again, I say so what? That doesn’t tell me nearly as much about the school as their average test scores, their student/faculty ratio, the % that graduate top 10% of their high school class, the number of National Merit students they get, and a host of other factors. To me, those admissions stats like acceptance rate and yield are just not meaningful to the type of education and experience one would have at a school.</p>