<p>
</p>
<p>Well, that can’t be the complete explanation. If Kansas’ yield is lower than Nebraska’s because Kansas has a major competitor in Kansas Sate, then we’d expect Kansas State’s yield to be lower, too, right? But it’s not: according to US News (they don’t actually give you the yield, but it’s easy enough to calculated by dividing the number of enrolled freshmen by the number of admitted freshmen), K-State’s yield was 63.5% in the same year Kansas’ was 40%. So, despite having a major in-state competitor, K-State was pretty much at the stratospheric Nebraska yield rate, while Kansas wasn’t. So something is going on here besides competition or the lack of it. Quality? Value? Who knows? </p>
<p>I call it being a “destination school,” meaning that the schools with the highest yields are the first choice of a large percentage of their applicants and therefore of their admitted students. There might be a lot of different reasons for that. For Harvard it’s being perceived as the top of the heap. For Nebraska maybe it’s a combination of quality, value, and a culture that says there’s no reason to go elsewhere when you can get “good enough” right here (and besides, you can get those coveted Cornhusker football tickets). For BYU it’s being a very good school and a Mormon school and that makes it the first choice of a lot of Mormons. For other schools there may be other reasons. I don’t mean to suggest that “destination schools” are somehow better than others. I do mean to suggest that schools with the highest yields probably have a lot of incoming students who got to their “dream school,” the one they really aspired to. And for many applicants that’s NOT Harvard. There are lots of qualities that might make a school a dream school or a “destination school” for a particular type of applicant. </p>
<p>And when a school finds its niche and markets itself to the students who are likeliest to want to make it their first choice, to my mind it’s doing a more efficient and better job at the admissions game than schools that are engaged in this crazy “arms race” to inflate the sheer numbers of applicants in the hope that a few stick. U.S. News, of course, may punish that niche school, a little anyway, if it doesn’t turn down a large number of applicants and therefore ends up with a high admit rate.</p>