I work in higher ed, and one point I’ll add is that colleges may not be so much protecting their yield for rankings purposes as trying to avoid admitting students whose chances of actually enrolling are highly uncertain. It’s obviously bad for colleges to underenroll. It’s not quite as bad for them to overenroll, but it is still very bad (crowded dorms and classrooms, students can’t get classes they want, etc.). I would guess that, because students with top stats apply to more colleges and apply to rejective colleges that are very unpredictable, it is really tough to figure out how likely they are to attend any given college in, say, the 20-40 range, and that makes them less desirable admits for those colleges, especially relative to waitlisting them, which gives the college a lot more control. This may not be a determinative consideration most of the time, but I’d be surprised if colleges in that range did not take it into account.
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