In state letters any day now...

markopolo
Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:30:18 +0000

This is in no way official, just my PERSONAL speculation (which is why this is NOT being posted via BingAmbassador):

OOS students make up roughly [url=http://mzakariya.com/BUGuide.pdf]15%[/url] of Binghamton’s student body. Perhaps Admissions has this as a set figure; they intend upon having that 15% each and every year. A vast majority of applicants to Binghamton are IS students.

With that in mind, it’s easy to see why Admissions is able to notify OOS students earlier in the game: there are fewer of them, and they already know how many of them they wish to accept. Perhaps they receive enough OOS applicants to meet their 15% goal very quickly. With IS students, they receive far more applications, and so they might have more flexibility in terms of picking the best students. Also keep in mind the yield for OOS students might be different than that of IS students. Maybe only 10% of OOS come to Binghamton because of the higher pricetag (so Admissions would need to accept more OOS students than IS students to meet their 15% goal, which would explain why some OOS students tend to have lower ‘numbers’ than IS students), or perhaps 40% choose to come here because OOS tuition might be lower than THEIR IS tuition at their state school.

OOS = Fewer applicants, 15%, Admissions has a smaller pool to work with, different yields than IS students
IS = Huge number of applicants, 75%, Admissions has a much larger pool to work with, and this pool makes up a whopping majority of the student body

If Admissions notified IS students as quickly as they did OOS, they’d run out of slots WAY too quickly, and would have to automatically reject students because the class of 2014 would already be full.

Of course, I’m sure the additional $32,000 that an OOS student nets Binghamton over 4 years is something they consider. Let’s be realistic.