Smaller Schools = Lower Acceptance Rate

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There was a long and rancorous thread in the Private School forum a while back, about how Sidwell is "more desirable" than, say, St. Johns College high school, based on the fact that Sidwell has lower admissions rates. But Sidwell has smaller classes than St. Johns, and also has fewer applicants than St. Johns.

So what's a better measure of "desirability"? The number of applicants, or the ratio of applicants to acceptances? Something like 100,000 kids apply to USC every year for, what, 5,000 freshman class slots? (Anybody, feel free to make my stats more precise.) Compare this to 35,000 applications to Harvard for 2,200 slots there.

Are we to say that USC is more "desirable" than Harvard because 100,000 kids applied vs. 35,000 applications to Harvard? I would. Even if the freshman class size is larger at USC. Even if questions like relative affordability play into USC's appeal, I think that's a totally legitimate facet of "desirability."

This is just all kinds of wrong. This "analysis" completely ignores yield. Harvard's yield is around 80%. Thus Harvard will offer around 1920 students a spot, even though it is has only 1600 seats. USC's yield is 33% and they have 4500 seats so USC will offer 13,500 students. Two thirds of students of these students USC accepts find other schools more desirable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There was a long and rancorous thread in the Private School forum a while back, about how Sidwell is "more desirable" than, say, St. Johns College high school, based on the fact that Sidwell has lower admissions rates. But Sidwell has smaller classes than St. Johns, and also has fewer applicants than St. Johns.

So what's a better measure of "desirability"? The number of applicants, or the ratio of applicants to acceptances? Something like 100,000 kids apply to USC every year for, what, 5,000 freshman class slots? (Anybody, feel free to make my stats more precise.) Compare this to 35,000 applications to Harvard for 2,200 slots there.

Are we to say that USC is more "desirable" than Harvard because 100,000 kids applied vs. 35,000 applications to Harvard? I would. Even if the freshman class size is larger at USC. Even if questions like relative affordability play into USC's appeal, I think that's a totally legitimate facet of "desirability."

This is just all kinds of wrong. This "analysis" completely ignores yield. Harvard's yield is around 80%. Thus Harvard will offer around 1920 students a spot, even though it is has only 1600 seats. USC's yield is 33% and they have 4500 seats so USC will offer 13,500 students. Two thirds of students of these students USC accepts find other schools more desirable.

Bingo - Yield, not "acceptance rate" is the metric to use for selectivity.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There was a long and rancorous thread in the Private School forum a while back, about how Sidwell is "more desirable" than, say, St. Johns College high school, based on the fact that Sidwell has lower admissions rates. But Sidwell has smaller classes than St. Johns, and also has fewer applicants than St. Johns.

So what's a better measure of "desirability"? The number of applicants, or the ratio of applicants to acceptances? Something like 100,000 kids apply to USC every year for, what, 5,000 freshman class slots? (Anybody, feel free to make my stats more precise.) Compare this to 35,000 applications to Harvard for 2,200 slots there.

Are we to say that USC is more "desirable" than Harvard because 100,000 kids applied vs. 35,000 applications to Harvard? I would. Even if the freshman class size is larger at USC. Even if questions like relative affordability play into USC's appeal, I think that's a totally legitimate facet of "desirability."

This is just all kinds of wrong. This "analysis" completely ignores yield. Harvard's yield is around 80%. Thus Harvard will offer around 1920 students a spot, even though it is has only 1600 seats. USC's yield is 33% and they have 4500 seats so USC will offer 13,500 students. Two thirds of students of these students USC accepts find other schools more desirable.

Disagree somewhat. Yield is out of kids who actually bothered to apply to Harvard. That tricky denominator thing again. 30,000 more kids applied to UCLA than to Harvard. You can argue about the reasons (UCLA is cheap in state, the "you never know" argument for Harvard) but the fact is that tens of thousands of more kids thought UCLA was desirable.

All yield says is that the 35,000 kids who applied to Harvard REALLY want to go. It's intensity of desire rather than UCLA's broader universality of desire. Denominators again.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There was a long and rancorous thread in the Private School forum a while back, about how Sidwell is "more desirable" than, say, St. Johns College high school, based on the fact that Sidwell has lower admissions rates. But Sidwell has smaller classes than St. Johns, and also has fewer applicants than St. Johns.

So what's a better measure of "desirability"? The number of applicants, or the ratio of applicants to acceptances? Something like 100,000 kids apply to USC every year for, what, 5,000 freshman class slots? (Anybody, feel free to make my stats more precise.) Compare this to 35,000 applications to Harvard for 2,200 slots there.

Are we to say that USC is more "desirable" than Harvard because 100,000 kids applied vs. 35,000 applications to Harvard? I would. Even if the freshman class size is larger at USC. Even if questions like relative affordability play into USC's appeal, I think that's a totally legitimate facet of "desirability."

This is just all kinds of wrong. This "analysis" completely ignores yield. Harvard's yield is around 80%. Thus Harvard will offer around 1920 students a spot, even though it is has only 1600 seats. USC's yield is 33% and they have 4500 seats so USC will offer 13,500 students. Two thirds of students of these students USC accepts find other schools more desirable.

Talking about "yield" takes you down the wrong road, too. (I'm not going to be as abusive as you are, but let's just say you're wrong to focus on yield because you're missing that demonimator issue again.) Yield smooshes up acceptances (the numerator) and applications (the denominator) in a way that's misleading because it's very specific to a given school. For example, the Curtis Institute of Music has one of the highest yields in the country. That's because tuition is free at Curtis. And Curtis' entering class is... wait for it... 23 kids. But it would be very wrong to conclude from this that Curtis, or Pratt, or Juliard have broad appeal to non-musical high school kids across the country (I do know someone who went there, though). It would be wrong to conclude that your kid, or mine, find Curtis "desirable."

All yield shows is that Harvard's applicants are extremely committed to Harvard. But Harvard, like Curtis, has a very special applicant pool of, shall we say, strivers. By sheer numbers, however, UCLA still has more total applicants.

Lets look at the number of enrolled/matriculated kids at Harvard and UCLA, then. This is after the whole accpetance thing. Harvard enrolls about 1,700 freshmen, compared to UCLS which enrolled about 4,100 freshmen in 2013. Still more kids *choosing* UCLA.

I suspect you're implicitly trying to make an argument about how many of those UCLA kids are disappointed Harvard/Stanford rejects and are justat UCLA because it was the best choice they were offered. But show us some stats on that. Prove that most of the 4,000 kids who enter UCLA would have prefered to go *anywhere else*. Prove to us that some majority fraction of UCLA's 4,000 kids wouldn't have chosen UCLA over Harvard because of UCA's low cost, west coast location, and advantages in STEM and other fields.