<p>Every day I hear: such and such college accepted xxxx number of students, and xxx number of students enrolled. Number of accepted students is always many times greater than number of enrolled students. I understand that students apply to more than one colleges and despite multiple acceptances they can only attend one, but how is it that colleges are accurately able to predict what percentage of accepted students will chose to enroll? Out of roughly 8000 accepted students, what if 4000 chose to enroll instead of 1100 or so which is the actual number of entering students and also the actual capacity of the college? How will the college a) stop accepted students from entering after reaching their capacity? and b) if allowed to admit/enter, how will they accommodate those many?</p>
<p>Yield management. Schools know, historically, what % of students who are accepted will enroll, and it normally doesn’t deviate that much from the estimate that the school can’t find some way to accommodate those extra students. If schools have reason to believe that more students will enroll in a given year than their historical yield rate, or if they want to give themselves an error margin, they may accept a smaller % and put more students on the waitlist than normal.</p>
<p>Hypothetically, of course, something could happen that causes a school to be crazily overenrolled - I can’t really imagine what could cause such a large and sudden disruption, though, short of a major natural or political disaster.</p>
<p>This, at least, is my understanding based on what I’ve read about college admissions and yield management.</p>
<p>Then, they would have a big problem accommodating all of the students There have been some situations when schools have been “off” on their expected yield, and it causes tremendous hardship on the facilities, students, and school for a couple of years. Schools do give themselves a lot of leeway with the waitlist as a result of that.</p>
<p>Some schools that are finding this a problem have not offered housing for those students within commuting range, moved kids to spring starts, come up with alternative venues for the fall, an other ideas when they are over crowded.</p>
<p>I think it’s where those applied math majors come in handy 
Someone way more into stats than me figures all of this stuff out. However, that’s why you see kids in triples sometimes - the school underestimated the yield.</p>
<p>This did happen you our state flagship last year. They had serious issues with freshman housing and many students did not get housing. The economy has a lot to do with it as families make economic decisions based on quickly changing circumstances.</p>
<p>Didn’t this also happen (though not by 1000s) to Northwestern? At state schools, I recall doubles becoming triples and study halls turned into dorm rooms. I also recall a huge surge in adjunct professors for basic classes.</p>
<p>MizzBee - I was just going to post that! The current Freshman Theatre class is larger than they like because too many kids accepted their program. Didn’t affect housing but does crimp their class size for theatre classes.</p>
<p>This happens. When my dd was a freshman, her class had a bunch of extra students accept offers of admission. The school had to make triple rooms to accommodate the numbers.</p>
<p>I remember in Fall 2007 or 2008, people were posting about what seemed to them to be a high number of start-of-year double-as-triple room assignments at Fordham.</p>
<p>I’ve seen cases where kids were housed off-campus at local hotels and had shuttle buses to get the kids back and forth to campus. But I think the “let’s turn-doubles into triples” is more common. At my son’s school, they renovated his dorm’s basement to add rooms, so what you used to be a large student lounge was now a tiny lounge.
It is certainly an interesting challenge for a school to predict. You may know what happened in previous years, but sometimes you get a larger than normal yield.</p>
<p>Yes, way back when… at BU, which guaranteed housing…we had too many enrolled students. They turned student lounges into quads (I lived in one!) and housed many students in downtown hotels. I’ve even heard of students living on a ship (St. Mary’s of MD?) Quite a story for those affected, I would think…</p>
<p>^The St Mary’s situation was due to mold in the dorms. It’s in a small town and since the college sits on the river it was easier to rent a cruise ship for temporary dorm space while the dorms were being cleaned.</p>
<p>April has to be a nervewracking month for admissions deans. Too many acceptances and there’s nowhere to put them. Not enough and there are empty rooms (and less tuition dollars).</p>
<p>What if all of a certain bank’s patrons decide to withdraw all of their money all on the same day? Any given bank never has the sum total of all its constituent accounts on hand at any one time. It’s all about calculated risk.</p>
<p>Similarly, the mathematician Paul Erdos made public offers of giving a certain amount of his own money for anyone who could come up with a proof that was eluding him. He had offered a whole bunch of different prizes for various proofs. At any given time, he never had enough money to pay out ALL of the prizes he offered.</p>
<p>Then some kids get to use a cruise ship as a dorm :D. That happened a few years ago at one school. I know my junior year in college they had an abnormally high number of students attend so they rented out a local hotel for dorm rooms for first semester. By second semester enough people had moved on for internships, winter graduations, etc. that they could house everyone on campus. The kids that were in the hotel were kind of sad to leave because they had their own bathrooms AND cleaning service!</p>
<p>Though rare (happening in a substantial way), it does sometimes occur. About a decade ago (or maybe was it more than that?), Dartmouth over-enrolled so much so that they paid students a small stipend to defer a year (“take a gap year doing something meaningful”) and enter in the following year’s class. They sent a letter to every incoming freshmen in late June inviting them to wait a year (with their admission still guaranteed to the following year’s class).</p>
<p>This has always been a strategy for overenrollment woes.</p>