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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It would be nice to be at a school that was a top three pick for most enrolled students. A yield of 18% is low.

For comparison, and because I like Minnesota, Carleton's yield was 37%, Macalester's 23% and St. Olaf's 28%. All better locations than Gambier, OH, so maybe it's that. [/quote]

Well, if half the kids are attending ED, it in fact is the top pick for half the class.  In any event, yield is a pretty dumb way to choose a school.  It's mostly a function of how well the college plays the yield management game as well as financial aid generosity.  Kenyon's endowment is lower, so financial aid isn't quite as good, and they lose students, most often to Grinnell and Carleton in fact, per their website. There is no question Grinnell has more money and is more difficult to get in. If that is why a kid likes about the school, just that it's fairly hard to get in, then he or she should attend that school.  But it's like marrying a girl or boy just because a lot of other people seem to be interested in her/him.[/quote]

While the correlation isn’t perfect because some schools really ARE self-selecting, yield is a good barometer for where a given school stands in the pecking order of school desirability.  It’s also a factor taken into account by the credit rating agencies like Moody’s and (along with its lower endowment) is one of the reasons why its credit ratings are lower than Grinnell and other top liberal arts colleges. [/quote]

Grinnell is a school that stumbled into an enormously large endowment thanks to a small number of donors and people who made a few very savvy investments. Good on them. But neither school has any financial challenges. Kenyon operates without debt, has seen its endowment essentially double in just a few years thanks to a successful campaign, and also just received a $100 million gift to build new dorms. So long as students continue to have positive experiences, both schools should continue to thrive. Rather than think of themselves as competitors, and of course they are, and it’s healthy, the top Midwest lacs should also be seen as a well-positioned subset. The ability to bring in students with merit money is going to continue to be a big leg up on the Nescac and other northeast schools who are slowly going to run out of families willing or able to pony up. They also benefit from a lot of local talent as Midwest kids don’t necessarily want to be too far from home, like kids everywhere. These are some of the best schools across the region So they get some of the best students from their region, whereas second and third tier East coast lacs are getting those who didn’t make the cut for Ivy either. [/quote]

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