Is there a list anywhere (perhaps by tiers?) of the schools with the highest yields? It seems to (perhaps naive) me that yield percentage is probably the best stat of a school’s desirability, at least among competitive schools.
@odannyboySF , here is one:
I did my own Yield Ranking for the US News Top 25 2017 LACs (excluding the two military academies), using the 2015 Common Data Sets.
Bowdoin 50%
Pomona 48%
Williams 45%
Claremont McKenna, Wellesley 43%
Colorado College, Davidson, Swarthmore 42%
Hamilton 41%
Harvey Mudd, Scripps 40%
Amherst 39%
Middlebury 38%
Carleton, Washington and Lee, Wesleyan 35%
Colby*, Vassar 34%
Colgate, Oberlin, Smith 32%
Grinnell 28%
Macalester 25%
- 2015 data not available, used 2014
Fyi yields are very easy to manipulate if you admit half the class early decision as many of the LACs listed above essentially do. Additionally, other schools have little to no competition and as a result have yields above 40%. Yeshiva, a school that targets orthodox Jews, is one example, University of Alaska Fairbanks, the only four year school for hundreds of miles, is another.
@spayurpets crowdsourced and aggregated a great deal of data on this and other admissions statistics for the 2016 season on another thread. Note, though, that yield is a difficult statistic, for a few reasons. Because CDS data isn’t yet available, the yield figures were necessarily largely based on the schools’ disclosures as to their targeted class sizes, which some of the schools seem to manipulate to make their yields look better. As noted above, a high proportion of applicants accepted early decision also increases yield at any school, all else equal, so you should take that into account school by school (it’s easy to check). Specialized schools may have both high acceptance rates and high yields, because the applicant group is self-selecting to a greater degree than usual. Finally, some schools seem to waitlist a relatively large number of applicants and then manage the list carefully, such that the offers they make to waitlisted candidates tend to be accepted, also increasing yield. Hard to check #1 and #4…
State schools have high yields both due to the cost factor and being an applicant’s safety.
Many top private universities that have large endowments can afford to give generous financial aid or they simply attract students from rich families that can be full pay.
Caltech was a surprise at 39.2%
I wouldn’t get too fixated on yield numbers, at least as part of the search. I’ve noted in a number of threads that there is a sense that schools manipulate their yields to seem more desirable, but I suspect that for many of them, the practices that they’re using to do this are reflections of the schools’ needs and situations.
Small schools often accept about half the class ED. So for a school with an incoming class of 500, that’s 250 students. But many of these schools report that 40-50% of the student body are student athletes, so a big portion of that ED pool are the recruited athletes. And as for the WL practices, if a school is in a relatively remote place (as most above are), they’ve got a housing disaster on their hands if they over-accept. They may, as a practice, plan to “finish” the class from the WL just to be sure that there are enough beds for everyone.
You can see how many were admitted from the WL in the Common Data Set, but you won’t know why. I can imagine that for admissions, predicting yield has to be one of the biggest headaches there is.
770 admitted at Pomona, 416 enrolled= 54% yield this year.
9.5% final admit rate (according to the new viewbook, see the bottom of the link https://www.pomona.edu/sites/default/files/view-book.pdf) out of 8100 applicants = 770 students admitted
https://www.pomona.edu/sites/default/files/enrollment-summary-fall-2016.pdf for the number of enrolled first years
In 2014, Pomona filled 37% of its freshman class with those who applied early decision. The RD yield rate was much lower.
http://tsl.news/articles/2015/2/21/news/6011-5cs-release-early-decision-results
Yield should be taken off as a consideration in these rankings. Although it can be an indicator of reputation, it can be manipulated, as others say, most obviously by admitting predominantly people who really want to go there. But what does it actually measure? The desires of accepted students who haven’t even attended the university? Or perhaps it’s the recruitment programs set up by the admissions office? The persuasive abilities of a university or college? – including financial and merit aid (but the latter can be measured more directly).
Or it’s just a measure of how savvy they are at identifying students who really want them. It’s not nothing, but it’s not the best indicator of anything.
@spayurpets did a yield ranking for Class of 2020 that broke out the RD yield for ED schools. http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/19751078/#Comment_19751078
Not saying this list is complete or final because it was made using numbers in press releases and not final CDS figures, but it certainly shows interesting data.
It’s fascinating looking at this numbers to see how high the percentage of the final enrolled class is from the ED’s. Looking at Bowdoin for example, they have a class of 500. 216 were from RD, which 57% of the final class are ED. In other words, a solid majority of students picked it early. The math is similar for many of them.
Never thought I’d see my undergraduate school, University of Alaska Fairbanks, on any kind of list right between MIT and Yale.
There was a discussion somewhere on CC last week talking about USC’s relatively low yield and the reasons for it. It was pointed out that lots of kids who got accepted had to go elsewhere when they found out how little financial aid they’d be getting from the school.
Perhaps the best way to understand yield is RD yield? I’ve determined some from last year among LACs (All data from CDS 15-16).
Williams–44.2% class is from ED
ED number: 244
Total yield: 45.5% (551/1212); RD yield: (551-244)/(1212-244) or 31.7%
Amherst–36.3% class from ED
ED number: 173
Total yield: 39.4% (477/1210); RD yield: 29.3%
Swarthmore–49.6% class from ED
ED number: 202
Total yield: 41.7% (407/976); RD yield: 26.5%
Bowdoin–48.6% class from ED
ED number: 243
Total yield: 49.5% (500/1010); RD yield: 33.5%
Middlebury–53.1% class from ED
ED number: 313
Total yield: 37.9% (589/1551); RD yield: 22.2%
Pomona–43.8% class from ED
ED number: 175
Total yield: 48% (400/833); RD yield: 34.2%
Mudd–35.9% class from ED
ED number: 77
Total yield: 40% (214/534); RD yield: 30%
Those ED numbers are unbelievably believable.
Means that they are playing the “level of applicant’s interest” game.