<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>
<p>People might tell you “who cares” because, while it does tell you SOMETHING, that something has little to no value on a comparative basis. Yield, in addition to be easily boosted by easy crutches, does not permit comparisons of a large scale. If Harvard can use its yield as a metric when looking at its CLOSEST competitors, they surely could not care less that BYU jas a better yield. </p>
<p>Yield is a statistic that is extremely important to a school, but is almost totally irrelevant to the students and their parents. Since a forum such as this one is mostly interested in the dynamics that impact the APPLICANT, it is not surprising that many consider the yield a “who cares” number. Just as nobody cares about who is the best ice fisherman in Green Bay, although he might be a super hero in his village.</p>
<p>^ Tsk, tsk. Rank snobbery, xiggi. Rank snobbery. It might well matter to a lot of people in Kansas that K State has a phenomenal yield, while Kansas’ is so-so. It suggests something is going on there that bears investigation.</p>
<p>It might also matter to some people that a school like Carnegie-Mellon has a modest yield of 27.7%, suggesting it’s not a “destination” or “dream school” for a very large fraction of the people who apply there, but rather a “back-up” for people with higher aspirations; and further raising the possibility, though certainly not proving, that a significant fraction of the people who end up there are “settling” for Carnegie-Mellon only after not getting into their preferred schools. I think that’s all information we don’t get from admit rates alone. Granted, it’s not a metric that gives us comparable information across all schools because the reasons that a school is or is not a “destination” school vary so widely, and for that reason I think it shouldn’t be a US News ranking factor. But rankings aren’t the only means by which schools might be evaluated. Not by a longshot.</p>