<p>I have heard that one of the key factors in the USNEWS rankings is the extent to which admitted applicants consider a given school his/her "first choice", Consequently, in an effort to bolster their rankings, many adcoms are giving excessive weight to this factor.
There is now an incentive for an adcom from a non-ivy caliber school to reject an app from a valedictorian with 1500 boards who has also applied to harvard, brown and williams. In my opinion, this student has earned the right to have a "safe school". Furthermore, this process of decision-making will obviously not maximize the overall quality of the school's student body.
The fact that this situation encourages and rewards those who lie about thier "applications to other schools" exacerbates the problem.<br>
The level of a student's interest in a school is a legitimate factor. The current situation,however, has distorted the importance of this factor.<br>
Is what I heard true? If it is, how should the problem be addressed.</p>
<p>It is true in general that schools will try to maximize their yield rates. (Yield being the % of admitted students who actually matriculate.)</p>
<p>Harvard and Yale both have yield rates near 80% (I don't know the rates for other schools, sorry.) It's actually an interesting statistic, because as much as people would expect that the same type of applicants would apply to both schools, the schools are clearly looking for different types of students. Otherwise, you would expect them to admit the same students, capping their yield rates near 50%.</p>
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<p>yield (or any function of it) is only a secondary function in the new usnews calculation, and a small one at that. the only current incentive for playing the 'yield' game is its minor, but positive, impact on acceptance rate.</p>
<p>harvards yield is currently hovering around 78%. yales has climbed to around 70% and princetons has recently dipped into the 68% range, near stanfords. as such, its no surprise that these four schools have the lowest acceptance rates in america. for comparison, only mit, columbia, upenn and brown among major private national research universities join the above four as being consistently above 50%. </p>
<p>what does this tell us? i dont think it says much as to the different types of applicant each school is looking for. between legacies, athletes, early admits and the limited number of students who actually apply to the schools, these numbers arent surprising. </p>
<p>what i do want to mention, however, is that each of these schools (and every other private school in america) has the obligation to admit nobody. theyre private institutions with their own agendas and policies. unlike a state-run institution, theyre not under obligation to be fair. i do agree, however, that incentivising schools to raise their yield rates for usnews (this number was in the calculations some time ago) would be a problem.</p>
<p>There's been several for-instances on several threads where people have said that a stellar applicant was waitlisted or rejected at X,Y,Z university while admitted to HYP. But I would point out that an adcom's decision to admit or not admit a top candidate isn't necessarily motivated by its desire to improve yield. (I thought I'd read that USNWR stopped using that to calculate rankings, but I could be wrong.)</p>
<p>Adcoms also are looking for "fit," for the students they think will be happy to come and thrive at their school. The UPenn admission director was unapologetic in one article I read about ED and how many students are accepted on ED. He said they wanted students who want to be there and indicating first choice through ED is pretty unambiguous. That's why there's a lot of advice about visiting, interviewing and showing interest in colleges you really want to attend rather than just changing the college name on the common ap and hitting the send button. </p>
<pre><code>Someone who indicates in the application how much they want to come to X,Y,Z may be the more attractive candidate than one with higher stats who doesn't get that message across.
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