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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If they can read a graph, have them look at this blog post (the entire site is great, but this particular piece has stuck with me): https://www.highereddatastories.com/2022/10/yes-your-yield-rate-is-still-falling.html

You can enter any school to see specific data about that school. They're all pretty wild, but if you really want to make an impression, try Northeastern: in 2001, Northeastern had less than 15k applicants and a 70% acceptance rate. In 2021, there were more than 75k applicants and the admit rate was 18.4%. And of course, all the top 50 or 100 schools have become even more competitive in the past 2 years since this data was released. [/quote]
From the article:
[i] I think it's most useful for higher education enrollment professionals who have to explain to people at their university why their yield rate is falling.  The short answer is that applications and admits are increasing faster than student populations: If a student today applies to an average of seven colleges, compared to four colleges twenty years ago, yield rate almost has to go down.[/i]

Does the article really make the case you're looking for?

The chance of attending is, roughly, number of qualified + interested students divided by the number of slots available at top colleges and universities.  That's a quotient: to see whether it went up or down examine whether the numerator and/or denominator went up or down, or both, and by what amount(s).

The rate at which students are admitted at an individual college or university, or even across multiple, is fairly uninteresting in my view since a student can attend only one school and the admissions rates do not influence either numerator or denominator. Here is what does in my view:

- population trends (number of high school grads has been falling)
- international students (was increasing in 2000's and 2010's to compensate for shortfall in domestic demand, has not been increasing recently)
- education trends (national decrease in test scores and college preparedness, huge need for remedial math for instance upon college entry)
- available slots overall (slight increase at top schools, huge oversupply nationwide across all schools)
- DEI trends (may increase numerator by softening the qualification conditions, though probably not significantly so)

It would be nice if someone compiled those numbers and put them together as a likelihood - how likely a student who meets performance bar X is to attend a top college in 1980 vs 2000 vs 2020. I'm pretty sure this quotient has either been staying constant or is probably slightly trending upwards.
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