Yield is the % of accepted students that choose to enroll. I have put the schools in clusters (80s, 70s, 60s, 50s, 40s, 30s) to make it easier to read.
Stanford 82.78%
Harvard 79.2%
MIT 74%
Yale 70.5%
Princeton 68.7%
Penn 67.8%
Columbia 65.1%
Chicago 63.7%
Brown 56%
Notre Dame 56%
Berkeley 55.5%
Northwestern 52.9%
Cornell 52.7%
Dartmouth 51.4%
Duke 50.4%
Vanderbilt 46%
Caltech 42.8%
Georgetown 40.7%
Hopkins 40.6%
WUSTL 37.6%
Rice 35.2%
Emory?
@Flurite oh shoot thanks for noticing. Here is the updated list.
Stanford 82.78%
Harvard 79.2%
MIT 74%
Yale 70.5%
Princeton 68.7%
Penn 67.8%
Columbia 65.1%
Chicago 63.7%
Brown 56%
Notre Dame 56%
Berkeley 55.5%
Northwestern 52.9%
Cornell 52.7%
Dartmouth 51.4%
Duke 50.4%
Vanderbilt 46%
Caltech 42.8%
Georgetown 40.7%
Hopkins 40.6%
WUSTL 37.6%
Rice 35.2%
Emory 27.3%
MIT beats Caltech by 31.2%. That is a pretty amazing statistics. I was not aware the STEM nerds prefer MIT by such a huge margin.
@85bears46 Caltech loses a big number of cross-admits to MIT ( which is expected, MIT is synonymous to tech and engineering, it is hard to beat). However I think the other major reason Caltech’s yield is low is because students are very afraid it will be too much for them. Caltech is a completely no BS school. The workload is brutal and one needs seriously superior brains and work ethic to do well there. Like you need to be super hardcore, even more so than MIT I have heard.
@Penn95 Do you have yield rates for RD? Given that some schools fill ½ their class ED, and that yield is probably 95-98% (some get out of ED if financial package too low), the RD yield for those schools would have to be fairly low.
I know people disagree, but i find these tables most helpful. To me they really highlight how people feel about each school and is the best indicator of what the pubic thinks is the best school.
Thanks for sharing.
While the data is useful, a single metric across all schools can be misleading.
I say this because EA, SCEA, and ED all affect yield in different ways. Schools that use ED will have higher yield, because the yield for the roughly 40-50% of each class approaches 100%. Less distortion occurs with the SCEA schools (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford). In contrast, the non-binding EA approach used by MIT and others reflects the true yield of the school.
Here is my revised list based upon groupings:
Non-binding EA (or RD only)
MIT 74%
Chicago 63.7%
Berkeley 55.5%
Caltech 42.8%
Georgetown 40.7%
SCEA/REA Schools:
Stanford 82.78%
Harvard 79.2%
Yale 70.5%
Princeton 68.7%
Notre Dame 56%
ED Schools:
Penn 67.8%
Columbia 65.1%
Brown 56%
Northwestern 52.9%
Cornell 52.7%
Dartmouth 51.4%
Duke 50.4%
Vanderbilt 46%
Hopkins 40.6%
WUSTL 37.6%
Rice 35.2%
Emory 27.3%
Chicago presents an interesting case study because they shifted from EA only for Class of 2020, to offering EA/ED I, and ED II for Class of 2021. I expect their yield to jump from mid-60s to mid-70s as a result.
Again, the more ED students a school takes the higher their yield is.
Should we reward schools for filling their class through Early Decision?
@Penn95 I have relatives that went to Caltech and MIT. Obviously that is a very small sample but from what I heard Caltech is even more STEM nerdy than MIT. You can get away from fooling around and not studying hard in MIT but not in Caltech. Each graduating class has less 300 students. They have take home test and exam. because everyone is supposed to follow the Honor Code system. Caltech should be STEM nerd heaven. My Caltech relative consider Caltech superior to MIT. Why would more than half that get admitted to Caltech decline to enroll?
@hebegebe
I think most people treat SCEA essentially as ED. Most people that get into HYPS early do not really bother applying anywhere else, and if they do they do, most do it just to see if they could get in and stick with their original school. At least this has been my experience from people I know.
Now for the EA schools, it is a bit different. There is a big number of people applying to MIT early because it is their absolute first choice and do not really bother with any other school if they get in, cause it is MIT. Also that happens to certain extent with Chicago too, but of course they do not get 95-98% yields from their early rounds like ED schools do (ED schools rarely get 100% out of their early rounds).
However it depends how you look at it. The fact that some of the ED schools have thousands and thousands of applicants willing to commit and forgo potential acceptances at other schools, essentially reveals something about their yield too.
@Sunny66 That is a good point. That would take more work and I ll find some free time later in the week to do it. Just off the top of my head I know the RD rates for Penn and Columbia are around 50-51%. Which is expected because the lose many RD cross admits to HYPSM. I agree that ED inflates yield rates but the fact that these schools have managed to get 5000-6000 highly qualified students to commit only to that school also says something.
@85bears46 I would guess because MIT has a stronger brand name. Like when you think engineering and tech MIT is the first school that comes to mind. Yeah I agree Caltech is probably more rigorous and the quality of teaching is better, but most students do not make decisions based on that. If they did Harvard and Stanford would not be the most desirable schools and hardest schools to get into
Jeez Louise Stanford. 82%?
The reason MIT does better than CalTech is because CalTech is incredibly tiny and has very little campus or social life. 18 year olds want the best education, but they also understandably don’t want to live like monks.
Theoretically, the more the school accepts in ED, the fewer the app in RD – think the extreme case that it is ALL EDed. So, the admit rate would be higher in this case. The yield/admit ratio might be a better indicator.
^ it is a trade-off really between acceptance rate and yield rate. If a school like Chicago (or Berkeley or GTown) had ED instead of EA, then it would not be getting the huge number of early apps they do and many/most of these apps would not come in during rd because to would be people who got into their top school ED/SCEA so the number of apps would be lower and the acceptance rate higher.
I agree yield/admit ratio might be a good indicator.
Top 10 Yield/Admit ratios:
Stanford: 17.2
Harvard: 14.7
Yale: 11.2
Columbia: 10.85
Princeton: 10.6
MIT: 9.4
Chicago: 8.4
Penn: 7.2
Brown: 6
Caltech: 5.4
The group of schools is almost the same as the USNews top 10.
What a waste for usnew to spend time/resources to create/ manipulate the rankings. Like the stock indices, the ratio is a reflection of what the reality is.
@ewho actually as more spots are filled in ED, it creates a panic in the RD rounds and students submit more applications (not less).
in an attempt to get into a highly selective school, students apply to many of them because the odds are slim for RD applicants because of ED …
@ewho true really. While USNews has its flaws it does a good job identifying what the top 10 and top 20 is. And so does this ratio for the most part. Getting the order within the top 10 right is not as straightforward though (I think USNews is kind of all over the place in that regard) and there is probably not one correct order since many people have different ideas of the exact order. But most would agree that these are the top 10 schools. Most people agree that HYPSM is the top 5 in some order and then Columbia,Penn,Chicago,Caltech in some order. The last spot is more contentious, I think most would argue either Duke or Dartmouth or Brown.
One needs to be a little careful in making inferences based on yields…
In an effort to appear more selective, U Penn pioneered the aggressive use of ED to raise yields back in the '80’s/90’s.
Based on the CDS U Penn appears to fill about 55% of it’s class via ED and then appears to take another 5% off the waitlist.
Columbia appears to fill about 45% of it’s class via ED. The number taken from the waitlist is unknown.
Based on their web page Emory appears to fill about 35% of their class via ED (I could not find the Emory CDS to see how many they pull from the wait list)
Here is the yield data extended to all Universities in the US News Top 50 - use with caution!
:
Penn 67.8%
Columbia 65.1%
Brown 56%
Northwestern 52.9%
Cornell 52.7%
Dartmouth 51.4%
Duke 50.4%
Tufts 46.5%
Vanderbilt 46%
Hopkins 40.6%
WUSTL 37.6%
Rice 35.2%
USC 33%
*Wake Forest 33%
*NYU 32%
*CMU 32%
*Lehigh 32%
Emory 27.3%
*Rochester 23%
*Brandeis 22%
*Villanova 22%
*Tulane 21%
*Boston University 20%
*Pepperdine 20%
*Northeastern 19%
*RPI 19%
*U Miami 17%
*Case Western 15%
*Class of 2019
And what about ED2 schools in this group?
Some students didn’t get in to their ED1 school and take a second swing at another school