<p>"Any discussion of yield without exploring how schools use early decision policies to influence their admissions numbers is without merit."</p>
<p>Yes, we should consider ED. The yield performance of HYPSM is especially impressive given the fact that none uses a binding ED system. When you consider the fact that they give up the opportunity to lock in a portion of their class, the gulf between these schools and the rest is even greater than it looks.</p>
<p>Xiggi,
I guess that I didn't express myself well. What I mean is if Stanford admits a lot low scoring people who don't have a place to go and then they have to go to Stanford, thus increasing the yield.</p>
<p>Before anyone gets carried away with the idea that yield=desirability=prestige, consider this: The University of Nebraska-Lincoln reports a yield of 70.8%---behind Harvard's 79%, but ahead of Stanford's 70%, Yale's 69%, Princeton's 69%, and MIT's 68%---despite UNL's 89th-place showing in the US News ranking of national universities. Yet no one seriously thinks UNL is more prestigious than YPSM.</p>
<p>How do we explain this? Market segmentation. UNL is simply not competing for the same students as HYPSM. A lot of Nebraskans apparently think UNL is a decent enough school, many probably prefer to stay close to home, and at $6,668 in-state tuition and fees UNL looks like a good value to no-nonsense, price-conscious Cornhuskers (87% of the student body is in-state). Also, there's not a lot of local competition. UNL is a distinct cut above public competitors UN-Ohama and UN-Kearney. The major local private competition is Creighton, a pretty darned good Jesuit school in Omaha (ranked #1 Midwestern Master's University by US News). But as a Catholic school in a predominantly Protestant state, and with a sticker price of $25,820 in tuition and fees, Creigton has a more limited market appeal.</p>
<p>Now it may be tempting for CCers to conclude that UNL's yield is so high because most Nebraska HS grads simply can't get into better school, but that's not entirely accurate. With 25th-75th percentile SAT scores of 1030-1320, the UNL student body may be a bit weak at the bottom. But the top quartile or top quintile of the class at UNL would fit comfortably in the middle 50% SAT range at a lot of prestigious private and public schools--Penn, Chicago, Dartmouth, and Brown, for example, have 25th percentile SATs of 1330, very close to UNL's 75th percentile of 1320. Rice's 25th percentile SAT is 1310; Emory and Vanderbilt 1300; Cornell and Johns Hopkins, 1290. Besides, a lot of state flagships have student bodies with SATs similar to UNLs, but very few come close to matching UNL's yield. Bottom line, geographic preferences, value, and state pride (much of it built around UNL's high-profile athletic program in a state where there is no competition from local professional sports franchises) define a distinct local market in which UNL dominates almost as much as Harvard dominates the "national" market---itself, I submit, a distinct sub-market among the several hundred thousand HS grads who apply to colleges annually.</p>
<p>bclintonk,</p>
<p>you did an admirable job on providing a very detailed explanation as to why UNL is an outlier.</p>
<p>Anyone with a reasonable grasp of statistics will see why you would strip out outliers such as UNL and a niche school like Yeshiva. Outliers don't undermine the general principal at play here, which is, as you succinctly put it: </p>
<p>yield=desirability=prestige</p>
<p>I wonder if there is a general enthusiasm factor about certain schools, period (within categories, of course).
Is there a strong association between yield and the much hated "alumni giving rate" metric, for instance?
I don't have the work ethic for this, but hawkette might.
As an aside, I wonder if Duke's yield suffers because it receives a considerable number of applications from the Northeast from students who prefer going to an Ivy, and see Duke as an equivalent.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I wonder if Duke's yield suffers because it receives a considerable number of applications from the Northeast from students who prefer going to an Ivy, and see Duke as an equivalent.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>You are contradicting yourself. If those Northeastern students predominately accept Ivies over Duke, then they don't really view Duke as an equivalent.</p>
<p>It's a "safetyquivalent." Same education and prestige for all effects and purposes, but we northeastern establishment students just have some sort of innate preference for northeastern establishment schools.</p>
<p>Duke would certainly be one of MY first choices (just after Stanford) after rejections from Penn and Yale (the only two Ivy undergrad programs that were of any interest to me)</p>
<p>bclintonk is 100% correct.</p>
<p>Schools like Carnegie Mellon, JHU, Rice, Uchicago are all highly competitively fighting over students that would apply to Ivies and other Top 10 schools. These schools also have no strong "loyal" student body unlike schools like Notre Dame (religious reasons) or Uflorida (in-state students). A lower yield basically means that the students they accept are varied and apply to other top 25's and Ivies. </p>
<p>This is further shown by the public school yields. Berkeley competes with other top privates so its yield is much lower than say, Uflorida, which mostly competes within the state of Florida and the same caliber of students who apply to Uflorida would not be applying (or choosing) other top expensive privates over it. In this case, being a better school (Berkeley) actually has a negative effect on its yield as its students also apply to top privates.</p>
<p>This is useless. Yields for Ivy league schools are higher than Northwestern, JHU, WashU, Duke, and UChicago simply because there are so many people who are obsessed with Ivy league which in fact is just a sport conference.
Can you guys actually come out with something like Harvard=Law, Yale=Law, MIT=Engineering, JHU and WashU=Medicine, UChicago=Economics...etc for Brown, Dartmouth and Cornell?
If you guys only believe in your own ranking system, then there is no need to look at US news ranking as it will just disappoint you.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Berkeley competes with other top privates so its yield is much lower than say, Uflorida, which mostly competes within the state of Florida and the same caliber of students who apply to Uflorida would not be applying (or choosing) other top expensive privates over it.
[/quote]
We better leave the UC's out of this discussion. The UC's are unique that the same application allows you to apply to all the UC campuses. In-state students applying to UCB are likely to also apply to UCLA; thus reducing the yields of both to less than 50%. On the other hand, Uflorida is the only flagship in the state.</p>
<p>the_prestige,</p>
<p>Well, let's see Caltech...17-6=11
Oh, does that mean Caltech is overrated?!</p>
<p>Also, Yeshiva is 7-50= -43
So, Yeshiva students must be really sad cos their school is the most underrated here?!</p>
<p>Be realistic man! Yield is not really related to how good a school is.</p>
<p>
[quote]
This is useless. Yields for Ivy league schools are higher than Northwestern, JHU, WashU, Duke, and UChicago simply because there are so many people who are obsessed with Ivy league which in fact is just a sport conference.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>who cares WHY students predominately choose Ivies over other schools (outside of MIT, Stanford) -- the point is that they do. The issue comes down to choice and the facts surrounding those numbers. We can argue until the cows come home as to "why", but it really doesn't matter if someone chooses Yale over Duke because that person likes Yale's shade of blue better than Duke's or if that student believes it's a better school -- the point is that the choice is made in Yale's favor a majority of the time. Some people will interpret that in one way, others in another. I say its fairly simple. More people believe that Yale is a better school than Duke and that's why those cross admits favor Yale.</p>
<p>BearCub, please see post #24 about outliers -- (this would include a highly technical school and one that is relatively tiny in class size or a niche school vs. your garden variety college / university -- i.e. Caltech and Yeshiva)</p>
<p>"More people believe that Yale is a better school than Duke and that's why those cross admits favor Yale."</p>
<p>How did you come out with that? This is yield rate, not cross admits rate. Do you know the difference?
Are you saying that the majority of people would choose Yeshiva over let's say Caltech, JHU, or Duke?</p>
<p>Ok, then tell me which other schools are the outliers? beside Caltech and Yeshiva? For what I know, how intelligent the students are in a school reflects how good the school is. So, if Duke students are as good as those in UPenn, don't you think that those two schools are equal and should be ranked closely with one another?
Btw, location plays a significant role in yield rate.</p>
<p>
[quote]
How did you come out with that? This is yield rate, not cross admits rate. Do you know the difference?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Do you know the difference? because I certainly do. There is certainly enough data to point to cross admits between Yale and Duke, and thus the example in the context of discussing the overall yield rate.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Are you saying that the majority of people would choose Yeshiva over let's say Caltech, JHU, or Duke?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>No, the majority of the students that apply to Yeshiva (a highly self selected group of students) choose to go to Yeshiva. Period.</p>
<p>Are there many cross admits between Caltech / JHU / Duke and Yeshiva? I doubt it.</p>
<p>"Do you know the difference? because I certainly do. There is certainly enough data to point to cross admits between Yale and Duke, and thus the example in the context of discussing the overall yield rate."</p>
<p>Yield is not the same as cross admit rate.
Well, I know Yale is better than Duke. But how about those schools that aren't so obvious like Cornell vs Northwestern.</p>
<p>"I'm not going to do your homework for you."</p>
<p>Well, I know what an outlier is and I asked that question simply because I didn't want to give another example just for you to say something like:"that's a special case, so it doesn't really apply here."</p>
<p>Let me ask you this, which do you think is a superior metric in determining which school is "better" between two schools (A and B):</p>
<p>1) the overall yield rate of School A and the overall yield rate of School B
2) the cross admit rate between School A and School B</p>
<p>
[quote]
Yields for Ivy league schools are higher than Northwestern, JHU, WashU, Duke, and UChicago simply because there are so many people who are obsessed with Ivy league which in fact is just a sport conference.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>While this is true in a de jure, anyone can tell you the Ivy League is de facto more than simply a sports conference. Unless there's a Big-10 or Pac-10 equivalent of IvyGateBlog of which I've hitherto been unaware, or a Big-10 Presidents Council, or a student-formed "Pac-10 Council" with its own plethora of entirely student-run initiatives promoting interaction between the 8 schools...etc. Aside from various inter-college consortia (Claremont, etc), I can think of no such group that has such extensive non-athletic relations and interests between the schools.</p>
<p>
[quote]
So, if Duke students are as good as those in UPenn, don't you think that those two schools are equal and should be ranked closely with one another?
[/quote]
That old NY Times "revealed preference" survey revealed the Duke-Penn split 65-35 in Penn's favor :D</p>
<p>
[quote]
Xiggi,
I guess that I didn't express myself well. What I mean is if Stanford admits a lot low scoring people who don't have a place to go and then they have to go to Stanford, thus increasing the yield.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Alas, your theory does not apply to Stanford! </p>
<p>For starters, Stanford does NOT admit a lot of LOW scoring students who don't have a place to go. A quick look at their admission rates suffice to ascertain the selectivity of Stanford, especially for a school that maintains a SCEA choice. Secondly, Stanford maintains one of the most competitive athletic programs in the nation and thus admits a small number of athletes who might have lower SAT scores, but nonetheless have outstanding qualifications. </p>
<p>Lastly, Stanford publishes analyses of their yield (presenting where and how admitted students choose a different school) and many of the yield "losing" students attend schools that are ranked equally or VERY slightly higher ranked than Stanford. </p>
<p>However, your theory is ABSOLUTELY correct for the numerous lower ranked schools that receive many "extremely optimistic" applications to highly reach schools and have an admission rate two to six times higher than HYPS and a higher yield. Applicants are such schools end up at the highest ranked school. Examples of such as many of state schols such as the many University of California univerties (Berkeley et al) or single sex LACs. Such schools have a high proportion of students who were not accepted at more prestigious schools and end up attending a school with higher admission rates, especially schools with MUCH lower SATs.</p>