[QUOTE=""]
reflects that MORE Stanford legacies live in CA than in MA...
[/QUOTE]
I think it is this.
[QUOTE=""]
It could be everything.
Holistic and all, y’all.
I don’t know that it’s “yield protection” so much as simple yield management. Look at it from the admissions officers’ perspective. They have a target size for their entering class. And they know how many applicants they have. How do they calculate how many offers to make? They need to make some assumptions about likely yield, based on their own historical yield data. Stanford’s overall yield is very high, but it move around a bit from year to year–80.4% in 2015, 78.2% in 2014, 76.0% in 2013, 72.8% in 2012. That shows a definite trend toward higher yield, but the movement from one year to the next isn’t uniformly large, and you’d have to assume there’s an upper bound on it somewhere; they’ll never get 100% yield. But they almost certainly have more granular information on yield from various demographic groups, including geographic breakdowns, so that, e.g., if overall yield is 80%, it might be 88% for admits from the SF Bay Area, and 82% for Southerns California, but only 75% for the Midwest and 60% from Massachusetts. Those numbers–perhaps down to the level of particular schools for especially important “feeder” schools–feed into their yield model to allow them to make finer projections as to how many admits of each type they’ll need to fill the available seats but not overfill them. Plus they may also have data that show, e.g., more year-to-year variability in yield from the Northeast and Midwest than from the Bay Area. If I were armed with that kind of information, I’d probably tilt admit offers toward the areas that gave me the highest and least variable yield to put me close to my enrollment target, then throw in some chancier, less predictable admits from other demographics to achieve other goals, like a certain measure of geographic diversity. In short, the goal isn’t to “protect yield” to achieve a low admit rate; instead, the goal is to rationally manage yield so as to control, as best one can, an inherently probabalistic exercise. It just incidentally has the effect of driving up yield and driving down the overall admit rate by tilting admissions toward the groups most likely to enroll if offered. Some other schools achieve similar results by making heavy use of binding early decision to fill a large fraction of their entering class. Stanford has such a high yield that it doesn’t need binding early decision, because it likely has some demographic groups that give it a similar level of certainty that they’ll attend if offered.
Forbes published the top 25 list with only the LACs included.
- Williams
- Pomona
- Wesleyan
- Swarthmore
- Amherst
- United States Military Academy
- Bowdoin
- Haverford
- United States Naval Academy
- Davidson
- Carleton
- Washington & Lee
- Claremont McKenna
- Wellesley
- Vassar
- Middlebury
- United States Air Force Academy
- Barnard
- Colby
- Colgate
- Oberlin
- Kenyon
- Bucknell
- Hamilton
- College of the Holy Cross
I think yield protection occurs at the school level (i.e per individual high school) more often than people think it would. Elite colleges rely heavily on regional AOs who are familiar with high schools in their home area. They generally have an expected yield in mind, and AOs and the college/guidance counselors are working together to ensure that expected yield to be achieved. If the school counselors are not doing their job well and the expected yield isn’t reached year after year, it will dampen the college’s interest in admitting more students from that high school.
Again, you don’t get it. The vast majority if high schools in this country don’t HAVE multiple applicants to elite schools. Maybe one kid applied to Harvard this year, and another kid to Rice a few years before, and another kid to Princeton the year before. I really, really wish you could step out of your box of upper middle class affluent high schools with multiple applicants to multiple elite schools every year, where there is enough of a “database” for a college to have an opinion.
Does BC or Lehigh look at this stuff? I’ll bet money they do.
Does Stanford give a %^&* about yield from an individual HS? I’ll bet ten times that they don’t.
When the cello-playing poet that the top schools ALL want to admit- they admit him. When a remarkable and creative physics Olympiad winner applies- including teacher references that she is one of the kindest, most modest kids they’ve ever taught- they all admit her. Without regard to yield. Harvard knows she’s applying to Princeton and Yale as well. These kids ALL have options.
Every adcom knows that a kid can only attend one college. A kid applies binding early? Then no other options. A kid applies in the regular pool? Maybe you’ll get the kid, maybe not. But you don’t reject kids who otherwise meet your criteria AND are at the top of the applicant pool because you’re worried they’ll go to your competitor and drive down your yield.
That’s why you read stories every spring of the kid who got into 6 Ivy League colleges. Apply to 6- get into 6. Kid can only pick one. That’s the way it works.
Pan- Stanford doesn’t care. Lehigh and Villanova worry about yield at the HS level. Not the tippy tops.
They all care. Good AOs care. It’s part of the yardstick for their professional proficiency, i.e. to find, to recruit and to yield the candidates they want most. It’s sort of like top end retail stores. You would think they have so many customers and they shouldn’t care if they can make as many of them as possible loyal customers, but they do.
Why do they want “loyalty” from a high school when they can have something more interesting by going after candidates from high schools other than your affluent suburban ones? Don’t you get that they have zero incentive to just pull from the same schools again and again?
Again, it’s your fantasy to think they have “zero incentive” to just pull from the same schools again and again. In reality, they do. Are they expanding their reach every year to try to draw “new blood” from new places? Yes, but magically they could do both.
Pan, there are so many differences between a top end retailers need and process to convert a casual customer to a loyal customer to what AO’s do that I won’t even start to enumerate them. But the main difference- Neiman Marcus doesn’t send me home when I show up to buy a pair of shoes if they don’t like the outfit I’m wearing. The shoes cost $500. If I have the dough, I get the shoes.
You don’t show up at Harvard with your $280K and get waved in. There are other gating criteria.
Got it?
They all practice some degree of yield protection for the very practical reason that being unexpectedly overenrolled can wreak havoc on housing and course scheduling.
Then some schools practice it because they want to report favorable numbers.
As for loyalty to certain high schools, I’m sure that happens in certain instances. Also keep in mind that some schools are also very focused on freshmen retention rates and 4 yr grad rates, so if they have had good success with kids from a certain high school that can have an effect on admission for sure.
Such arrogance. “I’m going to preen because I bought a house in the very best district of our state, and Harvard cares passionately!” Get over yourselves.
@blossom but what we are trying to “get” here is not a comprehensive guide on the differences between a department store and a university. What we need to get is that sometimes the same concept is so much more acceptable easily in one context than in another.
@Pizzagirl You are coming off very aggressive. People have different experience and perspectives. That’s the point of having an open forum where we can share different ideas. Words like “arrogance” and “get over yourselves” etc. are intimidating. I am scared.
Harvard is not worried about its four year graduation rate.
Again- you are taking concepts with I agree with wholeheartedly if we are talking about Adelphi and Hofstra protecting their yield, trying to track which HS’s do “the best” in sending kids who graduate in four years, etc.
But Harvard worrying about kids getting out? Stanford needs to figure out if New Trier or Greenwich HS has the “best prepared” students for their Freshman class?
I have no trouble accepting the fact that adcom’s engage in a lot of disciplines they’ve adapted or stolen or borrowed from corporate management. None. But the science of Loyalty Management in high end retail has NOT led adcom’s to track which HS’s send the best students to Stanford. Nope. The data which retailers produce which shows share of wallet, long term retention, etc. for a high end retailer already exists for universities- it’s called Legacy Admissions. Harvard doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel- the customers with the long term/multiple generation relationship to Harvard already know about Harvard and already apply to Harvard (they are legacies after all. They can find Cambridge on a map). If Harvard cared about packing the class with “customers” with loyalty and multiple generations of tuition paying families all it would need to do is raise its legacy admission rate to 95% of the class and then admit a couple of musical prodigies, scientific geniuses, etc. to round things out.
But they haven’t yet. And not because the Adcom’s aren’t smart enough to understand high end retailing and loyalty programs.
@blossom
But there are a whole lot of schools between Harvard and Hofstra that do care a lot about grad rates and retention
True, but we’re not talking about those schools. It was previously addressed that schools at a Brandeis, etc. level and below may well be yield micro-managing.
Actually, it would be very naive to think they don’t use a whole range of techniques to maximize yield. In fact, unless there is reason to think that pressures to maintain high yields have gone down over the past 20 years, this presentation from the president of Stanford concerning yield still feels very enlightening: http://web.stanford.edu/dept/pres-provost/president/speeches/cares/frames/uadmit.html A few snippets:
^^^ Interesting find. I have yet to read any specific evidence beyond the basic “common sense” argument (which as any scientist could tell you is often wrong) that they “don’t need to,” that elite schools don’t engage in the same efforts to market to students and manipulate their application and yield rates as most other schools do.