Admissions is not about validating your kid. It’s about filling dorms and classrooms and balancing the operating budget.
Without yield management, most schools would be careening wildly from too many kids (housing crisis!!) to too few kids (financial crisis!!). Any school not bouncing from crisis to crisis is engaged in some form of responsible yield management. |
No, they didn’t. Harvard lost for using race as a factor in admissions. Nothing in the case, or even in Harvards mission, implies that they can’t reject “better” (presumably you mean GPA and test scores) in favor of “less qualified” students on a non-protected status basis. Geography is not protected. Socioeconomic status is not protected. Thy are still free to accept a 3.75 GPA / TO kid from rural West Virginia and on FARMs over the 4.0/1600 kid from TJ HS or Boston Latin who has a patent. |
DH worked in admin at a mid-level university for years. They focused on accepting students who were likely to enroll. Applicants with stats beyond the typical profile were unlikely to be admitted unless there was strong demonstrated interest in a specific program or aspect of the school. Yes, they tracked visits , emails and phone calls. A high stat applicant needed to be very engaged to be accepted. If you just fired off a safety application the school sees that for what it is. Everyone has enrollment to manage.
The top tier colleges are a different ballgame. |
This. and public schools are designed to yield protect. |
Well: Case had a moment with my kid of, “hey waitlister! You know, IF we admit you, we’ll give you a sh*tton of merit aid! Whaddaya think about THAT?”
Along with weekly checkins to stay on the list: had to check off one of (a) Case is my first choice! I will TOTALLY accept an offer! (b) I’m still, uh, deciding (c) F*ck off. Took kid a few weeks to go from (b) to (c), and checking that last box was a pleasure. |
That's called racial discrimination. Anyways with that, all the schools equally not always admitting 'best applicants' |
We got over this every time these threads come up. Scattergrams aren't showing you much. You don't know about recommendations, essays, ECs, actual details of rigor and grades. You know the GPA and the test score. That's two data points. That's it. |
I believe it exists in some form and has minor influence on admissions. There are other things colleges care about much more related to their data and stats beyond yield. I do think it gets blown out of proportion and hyped by parents looking to explain or understand the mysteries of college admissions. |
You throw out "yield management" all the time here, but you can't be ignorant to the fact that "yield protection" is a specific practice of not accepting the top stats kids. Those are different things. |
This right here. |
I noticed a grouping of red rejected dots hovering in the top right corner of a couple scattergrams (and groups of green accepted dots with lower stats) and realized yep, something’s going on. |
Why apply in the first place if telling them to eff off was such a pleasure? |
It is yield management. All schools should manage the yield. Otherwise, you end up with either over-enrollment or under-enrollment. |
Georgia Tech might be yield protecting here, but it’s unclear as it’s a difficult school to be admitted to and it’s reasonable someone gets into MIT but not Georgia Tech. Duke absolutely does not yield protect, both Yale and Duke have a 5% acceptance rate so it would be quite common for someone to get into Yale but not Duke, and vice versa. The only schools that are really confirmed to yield protect are UChicago, UPenn, WashU, Tufts, Tulane, BU, Northeastern, and some others. |
There is no confirmation for those schools…there isn’t confirmation for any school. How is it that Duke’s 5% (BTW it’s higher but less than 10) has no yield protection but Penn’s 5% has yield protection? |