<p>Does anybody know what the UChicago yield rate is this year? My friend got waitlisted and wants to know if UofC admissions has released this stat yet.</p>
<p>^^</p>
<p>How could they if they have not figured out their … acceptance rate yet. Yield and acceptance rates are only speculative until the day classes start as schools have to account for WL movements and summer melt. Many schools are influenced by movements in the WL of schools that are more attractive, and the domino effect does not stop until well in the summer. </p>
<p>Most schools, as long as they believe in making the information public and verifiable, will disclose that information in the Common Data Set around October. Other schools that cling to secrecy and the virtue of lacking transparency will simply obbuscate the reports from public eyes. This means that you will have little luck to find the number you asked for. Today and in October.</p>
<p>speculative figures range 50-55%</p>
<p>Yeah, this isn’t a number they publish, although other people will publish it for them after the new CDS comes out. You can get a pretty good approximation, nevertheless:</p>
<p>(a) By dividing the announced size of the class (that they do announce) by the number of announced acceptances plus a guess at the number of waitlist acceptances.</p>
<p>(b) By dividing the announced class target (1,400) by the number of announced acceptances (a little less than 2,700) and rounding down to the nearest full percentage point to account for some waitlist activity. Realistically, if the waitlist affects the yield by more than 1%, that’s a huge amount, and probably the effect will be smaller than that.</p>
<p>Even with the CDS, you don’t really know the yield without accounting for the difference between the number of people taking a gap year this year vs. the same group last year. And those numbers aren’t public anywhere. Normally, they should offset,</p>
<p>^^</p>
<p>Hate to disagree with the conclusion that the yield could or should not change by more than a one percent. </p>
<p>Based on your numbers, the current yield is 52 percent. Having to admit another 100 students bring it to an even 50 percent (1400/2800) and a reasonable 200 late admits would bring it down to 48 percent. </p>
<p>Since nothing concrete and verifiable is really known about the movement between March and September at Chicago, and that historical movements are as nebulous as bad Vermont Maple syrup, one can idly speculate about the size and use of the waitlists, including projecting that the WL and summer melt will create a need well below 50 additional admits. It is good to remember that the more one encroaches on the usual highly selective turf of HYPS, the higher the chances are of lower yield. Take a look at Duke as an example. Higher yield is often the result of balancing the offer of admissions to students who are not expected to be admitted at higher ranked schools. Admitting too many shoo-ins at other schools comes at a price in terms of yield. And that is why Nebraska and BYU boost such high yields. </p>
<p>Not that it matters much as the difference between just below 50 or slightly above is meaningless, and that the yield in itself should mean absolutely nothing, except for enrollment managers and the occasional misguided booster on an ego trip.</p>
<p>The last yield rate I’ve seen published for UChicago was 39.9%.</p>
<p>gcornelius: That’s a couple of years out of date now. It looks like this year’s is holding at 52% or higher.</p>
<p>xiggi: I didn’t say the waitlist couldn’t affect yield by more than 1%. I said it would be huge if it did. A hundred or more off the waitlist would certainly qualify as huge, completely unprecedented at Chicago. Once upon a time, I predicted that they would be accepting some number like that off the waitlist, but apparently I was dead wrong.</p>
<p>Also, BYU and Nebraska don’t have high yields because they accept people who are going to be rejected everywhere else. They have high yields because each is head and shoulders the best possible institution in some regard for a particular group of applicants. BYU is the best Mormon university, and people who don’t want to go to a Mormon university generally don’t apply in big numbers, so it has Harvard-like yields. (Yeshiva University also has very high yield, for similar reasons.) Nebraska doesn’t have much competition as an in-state public option in Nebraska.</p>
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<p>I do not have access to a crystal ball anymore than you do. And, unfortunately, there is little valid information to support an opinion of the “unprecedented at Chicago” part. Short of a released CDS that describes the waitlist admits, all we could do is compare the April announcements to the numbers picked up by the academic publishers. In so many words, this amounts to trying to see how the number of 3,340 compares the 3,406 reported elsewhere, and ascertain if the 66 difference is due to WL movements. But who knows!</p>
<p>But what purpose would it serve? You think that it would be huge for the yield to move by more than one point. I happen to think that it could easily happen when a school reduces its April admission rate by a fair margin, and especially when it admits more students who are strong candidates at more selective schools. </p>
<p>I’d be happy to see the verifiable data that shows that my speculation is a lot idler than yours. But then again, I have not looked too deeply at the historical numbers of Chicago, as I tend to dismiss the data presented by schools that cling on a theory that admission numbers should be hidden from public view for as long as possible. It appears that Chicago has yet to depart completely from the O’Neill questionable habits.</p>
<p>I had the same reasoning as you, except that I was maybe a little more cautious recognizing that they were effectively reducing the class size somewhat, and that they had increased the percentage of admissions allocated to Early Action. But as far as anyone can tell, if they are taking people off the waitlist, it’s onesies and twosies, not dozens or scores. I suspect the Early Action increase was the key. They know (and we don’t) what kind of yield they get from Early Action admits, and it is probably higher than I thought.</p>
<p>I understand, and my focus was more on the mathematical possibility than the real life one. After all, you and I know close to nothing about the admitted and WL students, except for the shared anecdotes. And, things do change, as the past 5-6 years at Chicago clearly demonstrate. </p>
<p>As far as the yield, I would say that one constant is that students attend the school that represents the best “deal” and that this “best deal” is often the same as the most selective and prestigious (that silly word) that accepted them. And, I do not think that it so different at Nebraska. That offer of admission is a combination of being their best choice or one of the only choices they really have. And that is not much different that what happens at a school that flirts with 50 percent admits and 50 percent yield – a la Wisconsin or single-sex schools. The bulk of the enrollment had no better options! </p>
<p>And, fwiw, this is also why yield is a mostly irrelevant metric as it does not directly mean … much of anything, and is totally dependent on the entire context of the admission process.</p>
<p>Yield from other institutions:
Penn 64.3%
[The</a> Daily Pennsylvanian :: Penn sees highest yield rate since 2007](<a href=“http://www.thedp.com/article/2013/05/penn-sees-highest-yield-rate-since-2007]The”>Penn sees highest yield rate since 2007 | The Daily Pennsylvanian)
Dartmouth 48.5%
[TheDartmouth.com:</a> Yield sees marginal drop to 48.5 percent](<a href=“http://thedartmouth.com/2013/05/06/news/yield]TheDartmouth.com:”>http://thedartmouth.com/2013/05/06/news/yield)
Harvard 82%
[Despite</a> Cancellation of Visitas, Yield for Class of 2017 Hits 44-Year High | News | The Harvard Crimson](<a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/5/8/2017-yield-high/]Despite”>Despite Cancellation of Visitas, Yield for Class of 2017 Hits 44-Year High | News | The Harvard Crimson)
Yale 65.2%
Princeton 68.7%
Brown ~60%
[U</a>. yield rate hits 15-year high ? Brown Daily Herald](<a href=“http://www.browndailyherald.com/2013/05/09/u-yield-rate-hits-15-year-high/]U”>U. yield rate hits 15-year high - The Brown Daily Herald)</p>
<p>How about UChicago? Still a secret?
I guess 55%.</p>
<p>How is it the yield at virtually EVERY top school is increasing? Brown, Princeton, Harvard, most likely Northwestern, etc. have seen upticks in yield. </p>
<p>Wouldn’t an uptick at certain schools generally lead to declines elsewhere?</p>
<p>No it wouldn’t. Because every top school is getting more selective, there are more applicants going to college, etc, college admission is getting just a little more dicey, and a bit more holistic evaluation makes it just a bit more random.</p>
<p>The combination of these factors changes it (not but much though) so that there is less and less crossadmits. I know a bunch of people that were accepted to one or two of the HYP’s but not all three, whereas a few years ago they might have gotten into more than however many they got into.</p>
<p>Maybe all those mailings have brought so many qualified applicants from new sources into the system that there’s no longer the same degree of overlap between the groups accepted by similar colleges. Or maybe the colleges whose yield is going down are further down the food chain. Or maybe some of them are lying, as xiggi suggests. Who knows?</p>
<p>Notice that it’s not so hard for a college with ED to have a sixty-something percent yield. If the college accepts half of its class ED, and has a 45% yield on the people accepted RD, that’s a 62% yield. So if the percentage of the class accepted ED goes up – as it has at many colleges – the yield is likely to go up as well, even if the yield on RD acceptances has declined somewhat.</p>
<p>Cue7, I was thinking exactly the same thing! How is yield increasing across the board? Who is going to be losing out? Yale and Dartmouth did experience marginal decreases, but that doesn’t explain the significant increases at other schools. Do you think it’s possible that people are placing a greater emphasis on an elite education in these troubled economic times (choosing schools like Brown etc. over scholarships from state schools)? I’m sure the fact that elite educations are now more affordable than ever has something to do with it as well.</p>
<p>Duke took into about 100 more in ED this year, it will make a significant improvement in yield rate. Harvard also admitted more in early action.</p>
<p>
As LearningLover said, I think it’s because these colleges are getting so selective. Students are increasingly having difficulty getting into more than a couple of them. If you get into only one or two of the most selective colleges on your list, odds are very good you’ll decide to attend. </p>
<p>Anecdotally, I noticed last month that the results threads and decision threads on CC seem especially different this year. Considerably fewer battle threads between similar highly selective colleges (“Brown vs. Dartmouth?? HELP!!”) and more between highly selective colleges and less selective ones, particularly with scholarships. USC+Trustee in particular seems quite popular this year and last. The decrease in cross-admits has been an ongoing trend for a while.</p>
<p>Most ED schools (e.g. Duke, Northwestern) have been trying to artificially lower their admit rates by admitting more students ED. This not only has an effect on their own yields; it also has an effect on EA/SCEA schools’ yields by eliminating cross-admit battles in the pool of applicants admitted to elite schools. Less cross admit battles implies a higher yield for everyone.</p>
<p>The prestigious schools all get to look good by having really low admissions rates, and ultimately, it’s the applicants who bear the burden. This is partly why I feel more people should be critical of schools like Duke and Northwestern: their self-interested and fact-distorting admissions policies are creating a crisis in college admissions.</p>
<p>Do you many schools with admission policies that are not based on … self-interest? Do you know many schools who would keep a director or admissions around who’d work to help other schools in an altruistic manner? </p>
<p>That is for self-interest, are you sure you want to bring the issue of fact-distorting admissions in light of “some” schools releasing no verifiable “facts” as a matter of policy? </p>
<p>And, when looking at admissions’ crutches, should we weigh the impact of huge waitlists, or the impact of artificially keeping admissions low in April and playing the phones lines in April and May to secure “guaranteed” enrollees for this cycle, or the next one? What about the schools that offer “free for all” EA admissions to poach candidates away from ED schools. </p>
<p>Here is a hint: all schools, from the almighty HYPS to the mediocre school in the boonies, do everything they can to maximize their admissions’ policies and enrollment mechanisms. They all do what is BEST for THEM, and none of them are creating a crisis. </p>
<p>Fwiw, the “holier than thou” is getting old!</p>
<p>Sorry, xiggi. There’s a moral difference between “free for all” Early Action and Early Decision. Sure, it can be a valid marketing strategy to hitch your wagon to the one that provides superior value to applicants, but that’s because it DOES provide superior value to applicants.</p>
<p>You are right that no one in the admissions world is a pure altruist. And your criticism of Chicago’s opacity is warranted. But you are way overboard about this, not only as regards Chicago but as regards many other schools as well. Some of what colleges do they do because it’s right, not because it maximizes yield or whatever.</p>
<p>And regarding the Chicago waitlist, there is no evidence that I have seen, here on CC or out in the real world, that Chicago has offered anyone on the waitlist a spot in the class of 2017. Maybe somewhere there are one or two. But nothing like the hundreds I thought there would be a month ago. That’s because (a) the class target is 10% smaller than it has been the past few years, because they are tearing down a major dorm, (b) they increased the number of EA admits substantially, and (c) more of the people they accept are enrolling, apparently. It’s not rocket science, and it’s not a nefarious plot, either.</p>