<p>Don’t know if the overenrollment is a statistical blip or hopefully the start of a new trend. But if TU can accept less students and focus more on those accepted, maybe the admissions staff can feel a little less pressed! They do a good job of responding to questions from admitted students. If there was say a 21% yield, they could accept several thousand less students and have less to manage. Easier to deal with 7500 accepted students than 10000 accepted students. That month of May must be stressfu for the admissions and FA officesl!Just sayin’</p>
<p>Again, the problem is which several thousand less do you take? Choose wrong, and you miss the ones that would have come and raised class profile. I just don’t know how you do that. But if they can figure that out without hurting the improvements they have seen, then sure. I am sure they would do that.</p>
<p>You and I will just never agree on this I don’t think.</p>
<p>I am guessing those enrollment managers know how do do that. I also think perhaps there should be more deferred that accepted so early on, as that seems to have affected the numbers a bit-- high quality reg decision applicants get deferred or denied. Perhaps a little more selectivity int eh earlier candidates could affect this…
Again-- I defer to the enrollment mgt folks</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Oh please, I’ve spent the last two years reading the mailings from schools ranging from the Ivies to 3rd rate Bible Colleges in the middle of nowhere, and they ALL have a sales pitch. </p>
<p>You might not approve of the pitch Tulane is using (you’ve made that rather clear), and that’s fine, but to say that Tulane has crossed some imaginary line is really stretching it.</p>
<p>That’s a good point Scorpio. The mailings my D got from Columbia, Chicago (very frequent and quite clever), Wash U, Rice, and Penn were close to or equal in number to those from Tulane. Chicago and Wash U might have been more even. He makes a silly argument that cannot be supported by the facts, as has been pointed out a number of times by a number of people. It makes no sense to engage him further.</p>
<p>Wash U and Johns Hopkins have a yield of only 30%. Carnegie Mellon, Emory, and BC (all great schools) have a yield below 30%. So while yield speaks, to some extent, to the ability of a school to hone in on who it wants to target, it clearly isn’t an indicator of much more than that. </p>
<p>If I told you 7 out of 10 people that got into Hopkins chose to go elsewhere, you’d probably argue that’s because they must have also gotten into an uber-elite HYPS school. </p>
<p>Somehow though, Tulane’s yield of 17% automatically means that it hasn’t grown in anything other than its marketing efforts? </p>
<p>Explain this:</p>
<p>Tulane had yields of 22%, 20%, 21%, and 22% back in 1994, 1995, 1996, and 1997 respectively. A 17% yield currently isn’t a huge drop (only 3-5%) over 16 years considering how competitive the new applicant pool is. </p>
<p>*The acceptance rate is a 3rd of what it was then. </p>
<p>*The number of applications has gone up 6 fold. </p>
<p>*The two test SAT has gone up 200+ points since 1993. </p>
<p>I realize that you’re just having fun on here but at least come up with some better arguments.</p>
<p>Yield is such an odd concept. We all use “Yield” as shorthand for “best students,” and we tend to think that means the applicants with the highest test scores, best grades, and overall most impressive resumes. I think we’re all wrong to think like that. It’s far too simplistic.</p>
<p>If Tulane, or any other top 100 school wanted to build a class based just on those criteria they could easily accomplish it. The trouble is they would wind-up with 500 Pre-Meds, 500 Business/Pre-Law Majors, and 500 Architecture Majors. Every admitted student would have great grades and scores, but the lack of diversity would be glaring. A great institution needs those English Majors, Art History Majors, and Russian Literature Majors just as much as they need the others. And that’s where it gets tricky.</p>
<p>Building that class is no different than casting a play. You have 1500 different roles to cast, and they each require different skill sets and personalities. You screw up, and the German Teachers wonder where their freshmen students are, and the Music Department doesn’t have any bass players in the orchestra. But we ignore all those variables and just talk about some silly thing called “Yield.”</p>
<p>Everyone on this board talks about how happy Tulane students are, how they get such a great vibe from the campus and the student body, and how special Tulane is, but we never go that additional step and acknowledge that creating that environment isn’t a random process or the result of blind luck. It’s like that because the Admissions Office does one Hell of a job of casting that play called “The Tulane Student Body” every 12 months.</p>
<p>If creating that environment means that the Admissions Office needs to cast a wider net, or admit/deny based on a different set of standards, or, God forbid, accept a lower “yield,” then that seems to be a small price to pay to accomplish something we all appreciate as much as we do. </p>
<p>I think we need to embrace that concept and have the courage to just ignore the USNWR nonsense and all the background noise that goes with it.</p>
<p>Hey now wait just a minute there Scorpio. Don’t lump me in with that group. LOL, just yanking your chain but I think I have made my position clear, and I couldn’t agree with you more.</p>
<p>Yield is probably one of the falsest (is that a word?) measures there is. We could say it 1000 more times, and SJUHawk and his ilk either won’t get it or will pretend not to, and life will go on. At the end of the day, when presented with an outstanding class of 1500-1700 students that will make up a high-achieving, impressive group of Tulane students, I am not asking how they got there, at least not to the level of detail of yield. If it was from an 80% yield or a 10% yield, the end result is the same. As jym said, that might make a difference in the work load the admissions office had in getting there, but that’s their job. Clearly in Tulane’s case this is the strategy required to achieve the result.</p>
<p>To me this is just a classic case like one studies in business school. Lay out the objectives, identify the strategy needed, decide on the tactics that most effectively gets you there, and see if it works. If not, make changes. Classic MBA case study. Odd to think that demeans a school when they all teach it.</p>
<p>I have another perspective. I am new to Tulane. I have always known of the school and knew it was respected nationwide, but had never visited. Watching my son make his decision, visiting, and reading these and other forums has convinced me that there is a certain self-selection when it come to Tulane. Those who decide to attend, I am finding, are often turning down higher ranked schools (as was the case for S2) who have better yields. I would be interested in seeing how many at Tulane do this; I would not be surprised if it were a higher number than found at many other colleges. I think that many students just connect to the school, its mission, and to New Orleans. They may not be the majority who apply, but for those for whom it is true, they are not settling for Tulane, they want to be there, perhaps more than schools with higher yields. I think this is one reason why the SAT profile is as high as it is for a school with Tulane’s yield. S2 already loves the place and proudly wears his Tulane sweatshirt.</p>
<p>I don’t equate Yield with “best students”, scorpio. I equate it with “students that want to go there”. Perhaps the simplest solution is more kids deferred or waitlisted. Period.</p>
<p>
Please tell me you aren’t saying that the students with the top scores are only going to be the pre-professional students. And even if you are (a notion to which I disagree) many of these students (a) major in something esoteric (the premed and pre-law students, not the business/arch students, though some may double major or minor in something else) and (b) change their majors and/or goals in college.</p>
<p>I started a thread in the parents forum about the meaningfulness of yield in this day and age. Curious to see what posters feel.</p>
<p>Benetode: the SAT scores have gone up just about everywhere since 1993. The SAT was recentered and the scores are now higher than their relative percentile scores in years past. The national average SAT score is now around 1015. It used to be much lower (800s, I think).</p>
<p>Are you talking about the SAT based on the 1600 scale? What is this related to here, other than the low SJU scores, perhaps…</p>
<p>SJUHawk is wrong. Obviously posted with zero research. Here are the stats (3 minutes total to Google and cut and paste):</p>
<p>Year Ver Math Total
1972 530 509 1039
1976 509 497 1006
1980 502 492 994
1984 504 497 1001
1988 505 501 1006
1990 500 501 1001
1992 500 501 1001
1994 499 504 1003
1996 505 508 1013
1998 505 512 1017
2000 505 514 1019
2002 504 516 1020
2004 508 518 1026
2005 508 520 1028
2006 503 518 1021
2007 502 515 1017
2008 502 515 1017
2009 501 515 1016</p>
<p>So after peaking in 2005, there has been a decline. His 800’s number is wildly off. So in the 10-15 years when Tulane has seen a substantial increase, nationally it has been essentially flat, and Tulane’s increase over that time far outpaces the national average.</p>
<p>SJU, better argument, but still no sale. :)</p>
<p>Don’t feel too bad though, it has got to be hard to spin this applications thread into a negative for Tulane. j/k Hope it works out for you.</p>
<p>Well, he got one thing right-- the SATs were recentered in 1993. The rest. Ptooey.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>On the other hand, the fifteen percent yield rate could be a plus for Tulane. Harvard, and many of the other high-ranking schools, often have a certain appeal, as in “You got into Harvard, why don’t you go there?” This isn’t to say that all or even most of the students attending HYPSM go for this reason or feel this way, but often the allure of big schools can lead to make a decision based on “name,” rather than “fit.” The excellent thing about having a school with a fifteen percent yield rate is that many students don’t feel this pressure. So, the student body is made up students who love Tulane for Tulane, rather than loving Tulane because it has a big name.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Yes I am saying exactly that. Read any of the 3000 anxious threads on here from aspiring pre-meds and tell me they’re not a touch more aggressive about all this than the average applicant. They’re in high school worrying about the grading system at different colleges because they’re already worried about their application to med school–and this is before they’ve graduated high school. </p>
<p>Not just the pre-med kids either. “The big Investment Banks want an Ivy degree,” “Georgetown is fantastic on the resume for law school”-- read the threads and you’ll see comments like that everywhere.</p>
<p>Are you seriously disagreeing with me when I say that these kids are the Type A’s, the ones who (probably deservingly because they’ve worked like dogs to get here) are going to have stunning GPAs, test scores, and extra curricular activities?</p>
<p>Threads like the ones I mention are everywhere on this website. But find me a student who wants to study French Literature or Drama who is worried about whether a given school has grade inflation. </p>
<p>I’m not knocking either group, and I’m not suggesting that one is more deserving than the other, but to pretend that an applicant’s intended major in college doesn’t impact their college application process just flies in the face of reality.</p>
<p>Just because a subset of the self-selected cc posters might seem to you to be more vocal if they are pre professionals is hardly any kind of data anyone would hang their hats on scorpio. Sorry-- its just plain silly. And if I had a dime for every kid who thought they were gonna be pre <<fill in=“” the=“” profession=“” of=“” your=“” liking=“”>> and then changed their minds when they got to school, I’d be a rich woman.</fill></p>