@Mastadon Very true. The yield can be manipulated by a few points by varying the percentage of the class taken during the early round. Still though yield can be used as metric to put schools in groups in terms of desirability.
@ClarinetDad16 yes ED2 also artificially inflates a school s yield, even more so than regular ES since ED2 applicants do not have that school as their first choice to begin with. I think the most prominent example of ED2 is Chicago, but they instituted the policy this year so we will have to wait and see what that does to the yield.
I feel like Notre Dame and BYU are special cases, because many people choose to go there for religious reasons/family pressure even knowing that they may not be the best choices for what they want to study.
Anecdote: I know someone whose Mormon parents refused to pay for any college other than BYU. Period.
Anecdote 2: my cousin was a math/physics whiz, and was accepted to MIT and Notre Dame. He really wanted to go to MIT, but his parents pressured him into accepting Notre Dame. He’s out of the sciences and now sells insurance. There is nothing wrong with selling insurance, I’m not saying that, but I think MIT would have given him better opportunities in the sciences, and he thought so too.
disclaimer Notre Dame and BYU are both fine schools, and my anecdotes may be unrepresentative.
@Penn95 “I did include ND on the original list I made. ND has a surprisingly high yield. I wonder what drives that.”
Religious affiliation. For a good percentage of Catholic families (including much of my extended family), Notre Dame always has been the ultimate dream school.
^. Why a 45%, not a 100%? The way to do it is All ed admission! And any school that gets a 100% yield can claim itself the most desirable school in the country!
You know, it wouldn’t surprise me if some schools have actually considered this. Certain schools probably get enough well-qualified early decision applicants that they could, in theory, fill every slot in the freshman class from the ED pool, with little or no dropoff in quality.
But think about it. Suppose that hypothetical highly-ranked School X actually tries this: they only accept ED applicants, and then announce an astounding 100% yield. Sounds great, but what happens the next year? Nobody is going to apply to School X by regular decision, because they know that School X only accepts applicants from the ED pool. But if no one applies RD, the total number of applicants will crash – which in turn means that the overall acceptance rate will soar. That would be bad.
So the ED-only approach won’t work – schools need to keep RD hopes alive, so that they can maximize the number of applications. They want lots of people to apply RD and be rejected, so that the acceptance rate can minimized. High yield is well and good, but low acceptance rate is even more important, because acceptance rate is factored into the USN&WR rankings and yield isn’t.
@ClarinetDad16 of course RD yield is more meaningful. But I doubt the ordering of the schools would change dramatically if only RD yield was considered.
@PurpleTitan Shh, let us live in our little fantasy.
But seriously, you’re right. Everyday people don’t care, or even know about yield rates. Moreover, yield rates are in no way a representation of school quality.
@PurpleTitan yeah of course not. But yield rates are to a certain extent a result of the perception people have of a school, which in turn does reflect to a certain extent the quality. It is not a coincidence that Harvard/Stanford have the top yield rates and not for example Columbia or Penn.
@Penn95, yes, but at most they separate HS or HYSM (and maybe P) out from the other Ivy/equivalents. Then the Ivy/equivalents out from other good schools.
No employer or grad school has such finely-tuned tiering that they care whether a school is #5-10 vs. #10-15.
@PurpleTitan of course that goes without saying. This is not about employer or grad school differentiation. Most employers do not differentiate at this level. They don’t even differentiate for HYPSM vs non HYPSM ivies/equivalents ( maybe they do for HSM sometimes depending on the field). And grad schools definitely do not.
But most people for some reason choose a certain set way when faced with multiple choices from this list of schools.