Any word on yield rate?

JHS
Sat, 02 Aug 2014 22:37:52 +0000

Why the obsession over a few points of yield this way or that? It doesn’t matter to anyone, unless maybe you are an entering first year and you might get stuck in a forced triple because the yield was too high. It’s a stupid metric for comparing colleges, because it’s fairly easy to manipulate within a range (more use of waitlist = higher yield), because it’s affected a lot by ED, so comparing yields between schools with ED and schools without it is apples and oranges, and because sometimes all it measures is how well admissions staffs predict who will choose the college. Which isn’t that interesting to the general public. Personally, as a University of Chicago fan, I would rather see them go after the best students, and accept that they will lose some to other colleges, than that they target only students who won’t have other attractive options.