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[quote=Anonymous]People are confusing two very different issues, yield rate (which translates into "applicants admitted per slot") and acceptance rate (which translates into percentage of applicants who are admitted). Even schools with very low acceptance rates routinely admits more than one applicants for every empty slot. I would be shocked if there is more than one or two schools in DC that can afford to admit fewer than two applicants per empty slot.

If you are skeptical of this claim, consider elite college admissions, which is even more overheated than DC private school admissions. You can look up all the statistics yourselves if you doubt me.

Even Harvard, which admits fewer than 6% of all applicants (less than half the acceptance rate some posters above claim for Maret and GDS) admits 25% more kids than they have space for, because 15-20% of applicants admitted to Harvard nonetheless choose to go elsewhere each year.

Do you really think Sidwell has a higher yield rate than Harvard or Stanford? Doubtful.

And w/r/t colleges, those yield rates drop precipitously after half a dozen tippy top schools. Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell -- all highly sought after colleges that in recent years have admitted <10% of applicants --  have *yield rates* that hover around 50%, and they consequently admit roughly two students per slot.

Most kids who apply to [any of] Sidwell, Maret, GDS, STA/NCS will apply to several of those schools, and every year there are scores of kids in the DC area who are admitted to multiple top schools. Each of those kids has to choose just one school.

So: yes, most top schools still admit ~2 kids for every open space, even when their acceptance rates are 10 or 15%. They know that wait listing a kid is dangerous: it decreases the chances that they will come, and makes them far more likely to accept another offer early.

It's simple math. Regardless of how low your *acceptance rate* is, if your average historical yield rate is 50% you need to admit two kids per slot. If it's 25%, you need to admit 4 kids for every slot. If your yield rate is 75%, you can admit 4 kids for every three slots. And so on.

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