<p>Among the high performance, high income suburbs in the Northeast, Michigan is a VERY popular school. The undergrad academics are highly regarded…especially Business. It’s a safety for many top academic students who do not consider themselves LAC types (even though the undergrad education at many of the Ivy’s they’re applying to are more like LAC’s than like Michigan.) And…Michigan seems to admit all of our 4.0 - 5.0, 1950+ students. Which makes it a match for our B+/A- honors students with good SAT/ACT scores.</p>
<p>So…I am agreeing with those who look at Michgan’s “low” yield as being partly a result of them admitting so many Northeast students, who end up going to Ivy’s or highly ranked privates, and used Michigan as a safety/match.</p>
<p>The next most popular school outside of the Northeast is Indiana – another big time sports school. It’s a match for our B/B+ 1800+ students, with a couple of honors or AP courses.</p>
<p>UVA is completely different. Much harder to get into from the Northeast. Scores and class rank for Northeast students need to be much higher than for Michigan. Also…sports are important, but it’s not perceived as being like Michigan.</p>
<p>What’s the “right” yield for a selective school like U.Va., anyway? If their yield was too high, it would mean that they were failing to accept enough top students–it seems to me that U.Va. would want to be losing a few students to Harvard and MIT.</p>
<p>Some colleges artificially inflate their yields and artificially decrease their acceptance rate through binding early decision. Some other colleges admit half of their students through binding early decision, which I believe is unfair to students.</p>
<p>On CC’s UVa message board last year, hundreds of students posted their reasons for deciding to attend UVa or not. In most cases, students were posting that they picked other colleges because the other colleges offered them large merit scholarships. UVa offers excellent need based aid, but no merit aid. (There are privately funded Jefferson Scholarships, but they go to a small percentage of students).</p>
<p>UVa’s out of state tuition is now $37K and is $40K for students entering the commerce school. Even for a family with a higher income, that is a burden, particularly if the net cost of another college after merit aid is half the price.</p>
<p>Yield rates have also been going down simply because students on the average are applying to many more colleges than in past years, and because UVa is getting many more applications from international students and from students who live far away. UVa this year received over 28,000 applications.</p>
<p>Yield is a meaningless metric to the applicant, because it’s so tied in to the uniqueness of a school and other things like location, religious affiliation, etc. BYU has a high yield because a lot of Mormons want to go there and only there, and won’t go anyplace else. So what? That says nothing about the quality of BYU relative to schools that have lower yields. Similarly, the Alaska example is a perfect one - a school in Alaska is going to have a high yield because you don’t apply there unless you truly want to be or remain in Alaska. So what? Any applicant who looks at yield is looking at something that is irrelevant.</p>
<p>Agree. As long as the admissions office doesn’t underpopulate or overpopulate the freshman class because they can’t predict yield it really doesn’t matter what the percent is. It isn’t “really” about chances because if you are statistically qualified for a college your chances are already “better” than someone who is statistically low for that college. If you are waaay above the statistics then there is a chance you will be deferred because the admissions might predict you won’t attend so I am of the opinion yield has little to do with the possibility of getting accepted.</p>
<p>That’s not “artificial,” though, unless you believe there is some Platonic form of admissions which excludes early decision programs, or some “natural” level of filling-the-class-through-ED which shouldn’t be exceeded.</p>
<p>momofthreeboys,I don’t think either UVa or Michigan are known for deferring high stats kids for fear they won’t attend. My son was in the top 25% in both SAT and GPA for UVa and they certainly didn’t defer him!</p>
<p>“And remember, most of these privates are actually inflating their yield by filling a significant fraction of their entering class with binding ED applicants, a group from which they get virtually 100% yield.”</p>
<p>But there’s no difference in yield. </p>
<p>If there are 100 ED at 100% yield, and 200 RD admits with 50% yield, then in total there are 200 matriculants out of 300 admits, 67% yield.</p>
<p>If there were no ED, move the EDs to RD (they still want their first choice school) and there are still 200 matriculants out of 300 admits, 67% yield.</p>
<p>Does not work like that Vonlost. The school would have to admit 400 students to get its 200 students and the yield would be 50 percent. </p>
<p>An alternative would be to admit 200 students in RD only, enroll 100, and then go to the large waitlist to score another 100 students via clever negotiations. Then the yield would be identical as in the ED scenario. The difference, of course, would be that the pool might not be as selective. Or it could be better. :)</p>
<p>Again, it does NOT work like that The number of applications influences the admission rate. Yield is the ratio of enrolled over admitted students. </p>
<p>Do you believe schools are ADMITTING more students than before? For instance, applications at the Ivies plus MIT and Stanford increased from just over 200,000 to almost 300,000 in the past five years. How many more admissions do you think were offered by those ten schools in the same timeframe? Here is a hint … it went up from 28,000 to 28,600 5 years ago, and has gone down since then to 28,200. The average admit rate went down from 12.5 percent to below 10 percent. The yield? Another story.</p>
<p>^^ No, they need to admit only 300. When ED was “abolished” those 100 EDers had to apply RD, but they all show up; that subset has 100% yield. The former RD subset has 50% yield. Together it’s 67% no matter when the “ED” group is admitted.</p>
<p>Nope, Vonlost. The ED yield is close to 100 percent (90 to 97 percent actually) because students have no option to compare. You CANNOT speculate that the yield would stay the same in the RD round. All you can do is use the RD historical rate for comparison purpose.</p>
<p>You rely on the assumption that the students have made their mind up. The reality is that the school does NOT know this and has to admit according to THEIR expectations.</p>
<p>The enrollment management people seem pretty good at knowing how many to admit(regardless of number of applications) and what yield to anticipate. Many times, the historical data shows pretty consistent patterns from year to year.</p>
<p>Nope, xiggi. There’s a constant and steady supply of kids who have this first choice, 100 year after year, and they apply ED. One day the ED processor retired; the same 100 kids are out there, apply RD, and all are admitted; the school still wants them. Criteria didn’t change, the kids didn’t change. The former RD pool wasn’t affected either. 67% in both cases.</p>
<p>With ED, you have to enroll (yield will be very high-almost 100 % because few will want to or try to get out of it). If ED is abolished(as it was around 2008 at UVa), those same kids who would have wanted to apply ED would have to apply EA(starting this year) or RD and may very well go elsewhere when they are able to compare other acceptances and financial info from other schools (even if they went into the process with the school being their clear first choice).</p>
<p>UVa had over 28,000 applications this year, a major increase and only a few hundred less than Yale. The admit rate will go down but the yield rate will not necessarily change all that much.</p>
<p>vonlost, the problems with your simplistic theory are many:</p>
<p>-- In the RD pool, the college cannot tell who the “ED” applicants are if there is no ED.
– In the RD pool, the ED applicants are not necessarily the most desirable.
– Many ED applicants make their “first choice” strategically; it may in fact be their third-but-good-enough choice. If they are given other options on RD, they may take them. (That is why colleges with EA, even HYPS, do not get 100% yield from their EA admittees.)
– Teenagers can change their minds between October and May.
– Financial aid competition can help them change their minds.</p>
<p>In any event, if you want proof that xiggi is right, and you are wrong, all you have to do is look at Princeton’s yield for the class of 2011 (its last ED class) compared to subsequent classes. Princeton is an awfully desirable college; no one accepted there has a clearly superior option, because no clearly superior option exists. Nevertheless, Princeton’s yield went down sharply when it dropped ED. Before 2008 (the year Princeton first admitted a class without ED), Princeton was accepting about 1,800 students/year to get a class of 1,250, about a 70% yield. In 2008, Princeton accepted almost 2,000 students, and every year since then the number has been above 2,200, with a yield below 60%.</p>
<p>Basically, what was happening before 2008 (Class of 2012) was that Princeton was accepting 600 kids ED with 100% yield, and then 1,200 kids RD with a yield only slightly above 50%. In recent years, its RD yield has been somewhat higher than its pre-2008 RD yield, but nowhere near the combined pre-2008 ED + RD yield.</p>
<p>Fwiw, the edit in my last post was … Ask Princeton! I deleted the comment because I wanted to use one example to make my point. A complete analysis should have been more comprehensive. Unfortunately, we cannot really compare Harvard, Princeton, and UVa in the years they abandoned early admissions because of differences between EA and ED. </p>
<p>However, here are a few numbers that offer an insight into P’s record. The Class of 2011 was the last class to offer ED. P admitted 597 out of 2275 applicants. You can compare that to the enrollment of 1244.</p>
<p>Last but not least, one should pay attention to the changes in WL admits. In the years after abadoning ED, Princeton had to go enroll several hundred students at the end of the admission cycle. A staggering number for a school that is considered one of the most selective in the country. </p>