Back to your original post, I have heard that BS yields at several schools in MA are quite high given Covid ( hearsay from friends and actual data from our own school). That’s surprising to me to say the least. I would have thought that many people would rethink BS in the midst of a pandemic.
Have also heard that many incoming and existing BS families are unemployed/part of the Covid shut downs. So this might impact FA and other considerations as well as yield. Many people haven’t worked for months and are juggling lots of things. I wonder how many kids will go to day schools vs. boarding schools due to the uncertainties still out there.
Overall, I think the number of applicants was still high ( my kid only applied to two schools so I know data for just those two). Of course applications were already in before the $%$^ hit the fan. For the top schools, I think the applications are always in the same range ( strangely).
@CaliMex , I understand the concept of yield just fine. I just find comparing schools’ rates kind of useless, esp. in the context of the question you say you are interested in.
You asked why people weren’t sharing and why people were piling on re: Thacher. I tried to answer. Other people are sensitive about the yield question. My answer isn’t an attack on Thacher at all. I am sorry you perceived it that way.
You have a specific, narrow notion of the usefulness of the concept of yield. That’s fine. But people who don’t share your notion and don’t want to talk about school-specific yield rates do understand yield.
I am glad there are responses to your question coming in - the question in general (not the specific rates) is pivotal to our kids’ schools and what next year is like. We’ll see how things unfold over the next couple of months.
Fwiw, I have no idea what the acceptance or yield rates are for Cate. All I know is they had a lot more applications this year and that they were at capacity before A10. I also saw on the website that they were still taking applications in case of covid-related attrition over the summer. I thought that was pretty interesting.
Also fwiw, yield for small schools can vary a lot just from a couple of kids’s decisions. Let’s say a school is shooting for 80 students and it has an 80% yield rate historically. They would accept 100 kids. 4 kids commit that you didn’t expect and you get Thacher’s rate last year. 4 kids don’t, and you get Thacher’s rate this year. I don’t think anyone can say that 4 kids’ decisions equal a meaningful trend.
Exactly, @CateCAParent … I was curious about the impact of the pandemic on parents’ willingness to commit to a BS (yield) and knew that the Thacher figures alone wouldn’t be meaningful because the school is so tiny. That’s why I asked about the rates at other schools. Matriculation rates would be a stronger signal, but we don’t have that yet.
What I think will be interesting is if a size of school, geographical area, % boarders or how open the campus is impacts matriculation.
Hearing how the question is playing out for colleges (Eg LACs, commuter schools) is somewhat instructive. You know the boarding schools are paying close attention.
I definitely think that - as with summer vacation plans - “final” BS decisions will be made as late as possible so as to assimilate as much data/knowledge as possible. It’ll be interesting to see how flexible schools become (I know some have already pushed out the first big payment date). Maybe it becomes another have/have-nots situation with some schools’ enrollments holding fast and others melting more than expected. We’ll see. I do have a feeling that the various WL threads will be more active than usual this summer.
BTW @CaliMex I have to disagree about whether yield is considered a measure of prestige. It certainly is on the school side of the ledger, otherwise they wouldn’t go to such lengths to try to avoid admits that they have little chance of yielding. The AOs go out of their way to understand this when they can (ask me how I know). The “I will go here if admitted” letter exists for this very reason. Schools definitely care about this. Now, whether applicants/families care is a different question. I don’t particularly care beyond the information contained in the data point.
I’m not sure I understand your point about yield and prestige, @DroidsLookingFor .
Let’s say you are an AO and have two equally-qualified, full-pay kids to choose from with the same strengths and ECs.
Would you admit the kid who loves what makes your school distinct and for whom you would be a top choice? Or would you flip a coin because the two candidates are identical?
Even if your boss wasn’t judging you on yield … even if the concept of yield didn’t exist… I’m pretty sure you’d pick the former.
Why does yield matter, then? Yield is a measure of whether you are attracting and admitting the kind of applicants who are most likely to love your school and enroll. You don’t want to waste your marketing dollars or admissions letters on kids and families who are unlikely to be persuaded. (BTW, that’s true for other kinds of marketers, too…)
Like many BS “stats” it appears that yield matters to some and not to others. For me, I really don’t care what the yield is for a school. At al. My kid is either going or they are not. My kids don’t care if other people are attending based on acceptance. They only care that they got in.
Likewise, acceptance rates vary a lot. Some schools are in odd locations and attract fewer students. Others are close to metropolitan areas or are very old and well known. Doesn’t mean you are going to get a better education at one or the other. I think folks have to dig deep for the data that matters to THEM. Even matriculation is an odd data set as mentioned many times. A large school is likely going to have a larger set of schools where kids matriculated and vice versa. Really is it going to matter if your kid goes to a school where the acceptance rate is 10% or 20%? No. There will likely be kids going to some great colleges from both schools. And the educational level at one school might be higher than the other for your child. It varies.
People are a little bit hung up on status and name. I often laugh because some of the schools people have mentioned here as being “prestigious” are schools we checked out and found lacking and some of the schools we liked some folks would consider to be off their list. Some of the schools mentioned I never heard of in my life and some I’ve known all my life. So what. Everyone has their own perception of what is important. Calimex seems to think the yield adds to Thacher’s status.
@Happytimes2001 - I do NOT think yield has anything to do with status or prestige. At all. I’ve said that multiple times. BTW: If I cared about prestige, I would not send my kid to a school that even people in California have never heard of
Let me say it again: Having a high yield does not make your school “prestigious.”
It ONLY means that the admissions team was successful in attracting and admitting the kinds of kids who would like/fit that school best. BTW: Families who care about prestige do not choose Thacher. They pick Exeter, Andover, and other schools that are better known and more highly ranked. The kids who choose Thacher are the ones who don’t mind the discomforts of wilderness camping/hiking or mucking a horse’s stall seven days a week … and who are okay living in a tiny rural community with a highly structured schedule that doesn’t allow for much free time. And who buy into a culture obsessed with its honor code (honor, fairness, kindness, truth.) BTW, there are a LOT of kids for whom that would not work at all. (My teenage self, for starters!)
But I wholeheartedly agree with your other points, @Happytimes2001 .
I realize now that people did not understand the point of this thread. I wanted to see if collective application and yield rates were down as an early indicator of degree of confidence that boarding schools might be open in the fall (or confidence that BS might be a good investment despite the risks). I do not care about prestige.
I really thought this would be one of those threads where people post their school’s stats without any commentary or debate. Did you notice how I formatted that first post as an example?
Not sure why discussing yield is “icky” or like “talking about money.” That’s simply not true. It’s a marker of how well the admission’s team is doing matching a candidate to the school. Attrition is the other side of that coin, nothing more, nothing less. It has zero to do with “prestige.” To not know yield or attrition is to miss valuable insights that help you make an informed decision. As much as I love the job that the Thacher admission’s team does, the School still makes its fair share of mistakes. Overall, I’m really proud of their work.
@CateCAParent and @CaliMex - I wish you two got along better. I love both schools and they are tremendous competitors AND supporters of one another. All of us boarding school parents are trying our best to choose the right school for our child and then, if all goes well, to support the school enthusiastically.
It is a wonderful school and I’ve pointed out that the two schools share a kinship and history. Cate even took in Thacher students in the middle of the night during the Thomas fires!
Our kid applied and was admitted to Cate. One of my mentors is an alum and former teacher. Unfortunately, our EFC there would have been twice what other schools expected, which is the only reason we crossed it off the list. (Cate is a younger school with a smaller endowment.) We loved the Cate admissions team.
And I can think of many types of kids who might thrive at Cate and wilt at Thacher, (starting with anyone who loves water sports, lol!)
Frankly, I don’t recall posting anything critical of Cate. Do you, @CateCAParent?
(I do feel as if my posts tend to rub you the wrong way… or maybe only mentions of Thacher?)
Bottom line: I’m tempted to ask the moderator to close this thread since ppl read all sorts of things into what I thought was a pretty explicit, cut-and-dry first post! This was never meant to be about Thacher or even the merit of yield as a metric.
Acceptance rate is a function of the number of current year applications and historical yield (not current yield). So no relevance to C19. And I don’t buy that some very forward thinking school AOs and administrators increased acceptance in March, predicting that there would be a pandemic.
Current yield for 2020 will not likely reflect the impact of C19, because most people were still like deer in headlights on A10 and were not willing to pass on committing to a school…especially after the months of hard work their child (and entire family) put in to that point.
I’m not even sure enrollment will tell the story. As evidenced by the disconnect between the stock market and the economy, people are overly optimistic and may still not be willing to let go of the BS dream on July 15. Plus, schools will vary in how they deal with open positions after July 15 - some with big endowments and other resources may enroll a lower number of students, while other less financially secure schools may head to the waitlist and seek full enrollment.
Assuming the pandemic persists and its financial and economic impact also persists or worsens in the fall, next year’s admissions statistics may be very interesting.
I already apologized if I offended yesterday and had moved on. I tried to shift this thread to a more productive conversation and away from Thacher specifically. And it was working! I thought we were good. Why was I brought back into this?
The only (!) thing I have ever said remotely critical about Thacher is that at times its marketing doesn’t match its ethos. I actually think that is a positive thing - the school itself seems amazing and the education of the whole person it provides. The messaging to me sometimes comes off as about something else. I feel like to get what Thacher is about you have to filter out some of the stuff that makes it seem like they care about prestige. Why can’t a friendly person say that out loud? It isn’t about the school itself. It is about inconsistent messaging.
But hey, clearly this hits a nerve. It has happened twice now. Lesson learned.
@ThacherParent - I will agree to disagree on how people, and the schools themselves, use yield. If schools didn’t care about how well they fared competing for the same students, why do they ask students who don’t commit where they are going instead? Why aren’t yield numbers posted on Niche, etc.? Clearly it is sensitive information. Sure yield is a useful internal number. The question is why is it useful to make it public?
People use yield on the college level the same way, and it is distasteful enough of a public conversation for Harvard and Stanford etc not to publicize theirs.
How @calimex, @ThacherParent, or Thacher uses yield is not the point. The comments above seem to support the proposition that others understand yield to be related to prestige. So what seems to have happened is that those people with narrow views of yield have been misinterpreted because they have used a loaded concept, unaware of how use of that loaded concept could be perceived. All I did was point out the mismatch of message intention and message interpretation. Isn’t that an important thing to recognize? And not for nothing, it was my misinterpretation- I thought @Calimex wanted to know why she didn’t get the response she expected.
Other things I observe that people rightly or wrongly associate with prestige: age of school, generosity of financial aid and size of endowment.
@CateCAParent: What prompted your last sentence? Was it my post about Cate?
To clarify: I mentioned Cate’s endowment (which is due, in part, to its being a younger school) only because according to the Cate AO, it affected the financial aid package they were able to offer our family. We never attributed the low number to lack of generosity, just to the different set of numbers they had to make work. (Like I said earlier, everyone at Cate was lovely toward us. )
What do Cate’s endowment size and its FA offer have to do with status and prestige? NOTHING. Nada. Zilch. But they have everything to do with our particular family not being able to afford Cate. That’s all.
Our family doesn’t care enough about status to have a strong POV about which schools are more prestigious than others. I only know that our school is low on the totem pole because it is smaller than most and just isn’t that well known. And I’m fine with that.
BTW: I don’t see any inconsistencies in how Thacher presents itself. But I also don’t spend a lot of time analyzing their marketing materials looking for flaws. I’m surprised you have the time or inclination.
@Golfgr8 Have you heard about the supposedly massive junior re-class movement? We have heard rumblings and now confirmed by my son’s coach. Apparently a ton of the kids who did not manage to get a college offer before things shut down are now trying to switch to boarding school to get another year of HS sports eligibility to be able to get recruited. Since the spring and summer (and possibly fall) showcases they counted on to seal the deal are gone, they are resetting the clock by trying to re-do junior year. Apparently the school is getting a lot of calls even now for late admissions, and some of the kids calling are great players.
I was a bit dumbfounded to hear it because I thought this is what the PG year would be for after graduating, not sure why junior re-class instead. But also because from what I hear right now odds of playing interscholastic sports next year at our BS are not very high, at least not for the fall but quite possibly beyond. So I really don’t know what to make of it.
How could they re-class? At this point aren’t all the classes but especially the upper classes which accept very few new students able to accept outstanding athletes? BTW, we have seen that most of the incoming Juniors and Seniors do tend to be strong recruitable athletes rather than anything else. Often they are outstanding and often not in the academic sense. Perhaps, they use the repeat Junior year as a way to get into a better college than would otherwise be available to them elsewhere.
In any sense, it can’t be good for those existing athletes who had planned on being the team Captain or having more time on the field.
@CaliMex yield is absolutely, positively considered a point of prestige among the AO community. They care about it. A lot. And not just to show how well they are able to assess applicants for fit. Our own application process (twins) revealed this acutely. We were probed in a not subtle way by the AOs of two different schools whether they had a chance of yielding our kids if they were offered admission. And the counselor at our school was asked the question straight up. This wasn’t about assessing us for fit. It was about protecting their yield numbers. Full stop.
I never said AOs don’t care about yield. Of course they do. Yield is a measure of whether they have marketed the school correctly (right targets, right message) and admitted the right candidates. It is a figure heads of enrollment will put on their resumes to prove they are good at their jobs.
But if high yield and low acceptance rates were the most important drivers for prestige, the “prestige” rankings might look very different than they do.
I’m glad our school doesn’t attract families for whom status and prestige are paramount.
The yield issue was discussed more bluntly 2 off 3 years ago on CC. This is actually one reason we did not apply to a certain school as a “safety” because we believed that they would have known it. I’m sure that one school in our mix got the sense that they were kiddo’s safety because they asked young kiddo (age 13) to name the schools applying to that year AND to rank them. I felt that this was “unsportsmanlike”…FWIW,…I don’t like ranking schools or golf courses (it’s personal).
SO if yield is not important, whey would AO’s put applicants on the spot and ask them which other schools they were applying to and to rank them? It still doesn’t sit well with us after all this time…just saying. But the coach/AO who put kiddo on the spot has a consistent record of losing seasons. Karma.
No one is saying yield is unimportant. But ppl disagree as to whether the reason it matters is because it drives and reflects prestige.
Yield is one of the metrics by which admissions/enrollment managers are judged. They don’t want to waste time and budget chasing after applicants who have little intention of enrolling or who might feel like they are “settling” if they do. A higher yield means you got it right: You marketed the school to the right families and emphasized the right messages to get them to choose your school. (Am I the only marketer on this thread?)
Also: Why waste an admissions offer on someone who is reluctant or doubtful when you can offer a spot to someone who is enthusiastic and grateful? All things being equal, wouldn’t we ALL choose the candidate who most appreciated what our school has to offer? I know I would.
Makes for a happier campus culture too.
Who wants a school filled with kids who would rather be elsewhere?
Classic quote, @CaliMex . I laughed out loud when I read this.
Formerly of Pacific Palisades and Pasadena, and a Polytechnic parent, I have more than a passing familiarity with some Thacher families, and guess what? They’re just like the families of kids at other boarding schools - the same hopes and dreams, concerns and worries, love and support, and yes, some status and prestige seeking.
