<p>Talking about it for a story in mainstream media was beyond stupid. But these days, with Naviance and scattergrams, these things become apparent so you get caught quickly. Some of your best sources for the most desired students follow these things very carefully.</p>
<p>The F&M story shows that there is a motive for schools to reject or waitlist students who, for whatever reason, are highly unlikely to attend. While there could be any number of reasons for the result for any particular student, there still could be a pattern of waitlisting “overqualified” students. Personally, I wouldn’t do this if I ran a college, but I can see why they might.</p>
<p>Tufts as a verb…I’m loving it!</p>
<p>I think what Hunt has expressed is right-on. There may be plenty of reasons to reject or waitlist a high-stat applicant that has nothing to do with Tufts Syndrome. Some high-stat applicants just don’t fit. Tufts Syndrome has as its motivation ‘yield protection’ in that a school will not accept the higher-stat applicants because they have a lower chance of enrolling. Tufts Syndrome is more or less a categorical thing…non-acceptance for individual misfit (whether it be for lack of demonsrated interest or other cause) is a different kind of discriminator, with presumably different motivations.</p>
<p>Any of you were tufted from a college? I fear that, somehow, I will be tufted from York in grad school…</p>
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<p>You are probably correct that few people look at “yield,” but almost everyone looks at acceptance rates, with correlate with yield. A LOW acceptance rate correlates with a high yield (think Harvard, with a 7% acceptance rate and an 85% yield). If the yield is high, the college can afford to be far more selective about its admissions and the percentage admits are then driven down and down, meaning the college becomes more “exclusive.” Exclusivity is, in fact, what tons of college applicants care about, and so yes, yes, yes, they care about (or receive the impact of) yield.</p>
<p>Folks, some are posting as if just accepting these greatest kids is all it takes- they have to accept the admit offer.<br>
Part of the point is that, when a kid is clearly, (let’s just say for this example,) beyond F&M, maybe clearly right for the next level of selectivity, why should an F&M bow down, put some other good matches on WL, go through “all that,” when it’s clear he isn’t the right fit, for one reason or another- and will jump at the better offers?</p>
<p>Again, too much assuming based on the only real thing outsiders can see: stats.</p>
<p>ps. Catria, grad school is entirely different- there’s usually a chain of contacts/interest/fit needed to get into your best choices.</p>
<p>@lookingforward - the applicant has invested the application fee as well as the time to complete the application. This should earn the respect of an objective review of qualifications without the hint of speculation about motives.</p>
<p>I will grant you that stats can be misleading but I would argue that taken in aggregate they paint a clear picture. Similarly, while fit is important for adcoms to consider, it would be ridiculous to reject a candidate based on stats and claim that the rejection is due to poor “fit”.</p>
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<p>No more stupid than the college administrator who was profiled in the 2005 Atlantic Monthly article “The Best Class Money Can Buy.”</p>
<p>I think we have to remember that the old fashion image of ivy-covered walls, professors in tweed jackets and freshmen in beanie caps (is that right?) is just that – old fashion and certainly not true now if it ever indeed was.</p>
<p>College is a business.
And they are in the business of succeeding and maximizing “profit” however they deem that to be.</p>
<p>As far as F&M goes … I’ve met people who have attended and like it very much but … there’s just something … “odd” … about it. Hard to explain. It strikes me (and my D) as a secondary choice for “rich” Greek-oriented students who couldn’t get into schools at a slightly higher level. Maybe that’s unfair. But that’s our impression.</p>
<p>kellybkk, </p>
<p>Low acceptance rates speak to desirability so I don’t find it surprising that those yields would be high. I’m not sure your approach holds up once you move away from the extreme low (or high) acceptance rate schools.</p>
<p>Here are 6 schools’ admit and yield rates for the 2011 entering class: Based on your approach, what is the order most to least prestigious?</p>
<p>Admit rate/Yield</p>
<p>A) 22% / 35%
B) 23% / 34%
C) 26% / 29%
D) 23% / 33%
E) 28% / 25%
F) 21% / 38%</p>
<p>A strictly statistical approach overlooks the fact that many students self select certain schools as well as apply to multiple colleges in an effort to “shop” financial aid.</p>
<p>hey, if a school knows an applicant is toying with them and if they wind up going , they will bring the negative I should be at harvard/ yale etc… the school should strike first. it is good on a lot of levels. think of it like dating and knowing the person will reject you , so you reject them first. ( a little off but, you get the point) tufts, frankin and marshall , etc…should do that without admitting it. a school like university of hartford should do this as well as dumping the bottom 25-30% of applicants and 10% of the top ones. it will benefit both the school and students who attend in the long run.</p>
<p>I don’t believe for an instant that the process should take the kids with necessarily the best stats first, and few of the more selective schools, certainly not the smaller ones, will operate that way. But no one can really guess where a student will be accepted. To out and out say that the top X kids, we’ll auto waitlist is taking the wind out of the holistic process sails. It’s not good for the school doing this either, for reasons I 've stated before. You can get away with it short term and get some jumps in the ratings, but when the word gets out, the school’s integrity is on the line.</p>
<p>I was on a college tour a few years ago at some LACs like F&M and there was one young man who really stood out as being so condescending and disinterested that it was rude. He made it a point (I heard him twice) to let people know that this was his safety school and that he was applying to see if he could get the merit money, and some other remarks that were not ones to make on a college tour of a place. His dad echoed him but in a less condescending way. Yes, if I were the Adcom and I noted this sort of behavior, it would be a strike against him in the admissions process regardless of what his application quality. I noticed he went for an interview and wonder how that went.</p>
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It’s ironic you bring up UPenn, because they did in spirit much the same thing F&M did in order to raise their reputation. This was covered in an article in the Atlantic Monthly (they seem to have a nose for these kinds of stories!) in 2001 – see “The Early-Decision Racket”.
Rather than rejecting applicants it thought might go elsewhere, it took the angle of admitting a large percentage who made it clear they wanted Penn by applying ED. Even alums paid the price; if an applicant wanted the alumni preference bump, they had to (and to this day have to) apply ED. This squeezed out a lot of kids where Penn could see it wasn’t their first choice, similar to what F&R was trying to infer. Of course it also squeezed out kids who couldn’t commit without seeing what other aid packages they might get. No free lunch…</p>
<p>Note, too, that F&M didn’t waitlist kids automatically because of high scores; they had high scores and no contact with the school. I’ve read in admission books that savvy HS counselors will in fact make a point of contacting a college when a student applies who really wants to go there but has scores well above the typical applicant to assure them they’re not just being used to collect admission trophies.</p>
<p>Personally, I think it would be short-sighted to sacrifice getting the best possible student body for the sake of the admissions rate. If you have a pretty good idea that only 6 out of 100 high stats applicants will matriculate, why not admit all of them, expecting to get only 6 or so? That’s better than getting none of them, in the long run. All these schools use past history of yield to decide how many applicants to admit, and they usually get pretty close to the mark.</p>
<p>ED is a whole other thing. A number of schools will say right straight up that by applying ED you will get an advantage. Penn is one such school and so is Cornell. It was right in their literature when my son was looking at colleges some years ago. Also, at Penn, legacies only get the boost during ED and they are dead serious about this. THey WLed and rejected Ivanka Trump and her stats were definitely in the midstream for acceptance. She did not apply early. My alma mater does the same. You are just about a shoo in as a legacy ED. but you “takes your chances” RD.</p>
<p>Michele Hernandez addressed this sort of thing in her book, now an oldie, “A is for Admissions” where she states very firmly that Dartmouth and other such colleges do NOT try to second guess who is going to go elsewhere, because the object is to get the best class, and it is imporssilbe to guess that way. It is also a crazy exercise of trying to come up with such rationale when you are dealing with the number of apps duirng a season. The time most admissions officers have to spend on an app is not very much. Playing games with the "what ifs’ is not a good use of it.</p>
<p>What is the purpose of increasing a college’s selectivity rate? To get applications in the future from more qualified candidates? If so, it doesn’t seem logical to reject the best candidates now in the hope this will increase the quality of the pool in the future.</p>
<p>The whole USNWR rankings is a true scam. If this is the end result- colleges seeking students who are likely to enroll, rather than those that they seem to be worthy of attending- then they are doing all of our kids a disservice. When I attended college from 1985-1989, the only statistic I knew of schools was the acceptance rate. How can we as a country bow to one publication and view it as the Holy Grail? I agree with the posters about F&M’s director of admissions. What he did was unethical and dishonest. Unfortunately, his actions are repeated at many of our so-called best institutions.</p>
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<p>This is a stretch, but maybe he wanted to see how they’d react, like how the stereotypical teenage girl acts deliberately aloof toward boys she’s somewhat interested in to see how they hold up.</p>
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Gee, how do you really feel ;)</p>
<p>The reason this survey gets so much power is laziness. People could go thru the trouble of finding out about class size, types of students a college attracts, how involved with undergrads the profs become, get a general sense of the college’s reputation in the wider world, visit colleges of various types, etc, etc. Or they could rely on someone else to give them a list, where number 1 is clearly a better choice for all possible students under all possible conditions than those poor places ranked 2 and below. Large companies aren’t the only ones doing outsourcing…</p>
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<p>Definitely a stretch. Odds are 99%+ that he was just a jerk who didn’t know or care how he came across.</p>