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[quote=Anonymous]I found this very interesting.  How were the top-20 colleges able to increase their yield from 40 to 50%?

Let's do some modeling.  50% yield for the top-20 colleges means that for every 2 students they admit, one will attend.

Based on past trends, we know that if students apply to colleges in the top 20, they not only apply to one, but to many if not all.

If admissions decisions were objective, admissions decisions to similar (top) colleges would be correlated, that is, students that are accepted by one top-20 college will also likely be accepted by another and conversely, if they are rejected by one, others are more likely to reject them too.

This would mean that most students would either be accepted by most top-20 colleges or rejected by most.  A student, however, can attend only one college, which means that each top college's yield could only be 1/n where n is the average number of top colleges that accepted an applicant that was accepted. n should be larger than 2, much larger: probably 4 or 5.

So how is it that the top students applying to many top-20 colleges receive, on average, only 2 admissions even though they, on average, applied to many more similar colleges and should be receiving many more, or none? 
(A yield of 40% means that they had 2.5 admissions.)

To me, the answer is clear: college admissions are less correlated than you would expect, and they are less objective; they are basically crap shots.

Only collusion or randomness can explain these numbers.

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