Even some of the ivys do this with spring admits or second year guar. transfers…It’s all part of the ratings game. It just shows you how easily manipulated rankings really are…
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Or how people are manipulated to focus on rankings
My OPINION is that many colleges work to “game” certain aspects of the CDS or Rankings but this isn’t one of them - though it has the convenient byproduct of helping some of their statistics.
The school knows that it will have extra space in the Spring semester due to Freshmen who don’t make it more than the first semester or seniors that ended up on a 4.5 year program. They don’t want empty seats so they offer some Spring Admits. Some schools also offer the Fall Abroad route for the same reason.
My opinion is that it’s correct not to include the spring admits in the core numbers. The very nature of that program - anywhere - is that it’s going to have a MUCH lower admittance rate.
You’d be surprised.
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That program itself would have a lower acceptance rate, but including that program in the total admit rate would be informative to the public. IMO, the total admissions numbers, rather than just the fall admission numbers, should be added to the data sought on the CDS. Is it really beneficial to the public to think that these schools have lower admissions rates than they actually do?
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I’d like to see spring admits mentioned somewhere else on the CDS. There is already a question in part C, “Are first-time, first-year students accepted for terms other than the fall?” So just fill that part out with how many students are accepted for terms other than the fall.
No argument there. More data is better from my perspective. Just like they call out the Waitlist information and have started calling out the ED numbers.
While we’re at it I would love to have added to the CDS the number of kids offered a spot OFF the waitlist. Today all it shows is #'s offered WL, # accepted WL and # admitted WL with no way of calculating a yield.
I don’t think it’s beneficial to the public at all to give much more than a passing glance at most of these numbers (including rankings, etc). YMMV
Like ALL schools, USC cares about its acceptance rate. However, there are many ways (including adding ED/ED2) for it to manipulate its acceptance rate and it hasn’t so far.
If USC added Early Decision and admitted 50% or more of its class through ED (like Chicago, Duke, Dartmouth, Cornell, Brown, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, etc.) its
acceptance rate would drop to 7-8%.
Spring admits and liberal transfer options are about Load management and accessibility (like UCLA/UCB, Cornell). USC is huge, and has relatively limited housing options on campus, among other reasons why it deploys its current enrollment model.
Shout out to Georgetown that goes out of its way not to manipulate anything. REA/its own application/multiple essays/must submit all test scores. If G’town changed any of these inputs its acceptance rate would drop precipitously.
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This would certainly raise the yield.
In order to lower the acceptance rate, the school needs to increase the applicants pool. Can you clarify how a school can lower the acceptance rate by going to ED?
Without ED a college needs to accept many more prospective students to fill it’s seats. Simplified example - College has 2K seats to fill.
ED - receives 2K applications and accepts 1,500 of them (100% yield)
RD - receives 10K applications, accepts 2,500 of them, 500 attend (20% yield)
Overall 12K applications for 2,000 to attend, acceptance rate of 17%, yield of 50%.
RD Only - receives 12K applications and needs to accept 10K of them at 20% yield to net 2K kids
Overall the 12,000 applications for 2K to attend acceptance rate of 83%, 20% yield
Can make an argument that the 2K kids that applied ED in the first scenario are likely a higher yield in the RD only scenario but the acceptance rate and yield can be manipulated pretty easily depending on how many kids the school takes ED.
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Good. To put it simply, because ED raises the yield rate, a school only needs to accept less students, therefore acceptance rate is lowered. The numerator is less while the deniminator stays the same.
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