For most American families, affordability is the number one criteria when choosing a college. If there are enough affordable schools on the list, “fit” can come into play.
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The most important factor, even though kids don’t want to admit it or face the fact.
That I want a top 20 (ie prestige) is irrelevant if there’s no way to pay fo rit.
Sorry, repeat on the immediately preceding message.
So non-binding yield is a function of a variety of different things. Actually, just having ED likely parasitically would reduce RD yield, unless of course the institution in question practiced non-ED yield protection. Merit can also be used to increase yield, as well as things like subsidies for in-state students. And then there are cases like BYU, where a particular affinity is obviously contributing.
Thinking a bit more broadly, non-binding yield is going to be lower for colleges with some close competitors that their admittees might be cross-shopping. So quite a few very well-regarded private colleges and universities have relatively low non-binding yields just because their admits often have, say, 3-5 reasonably competitive other offers.
Of course sometimes they are losing a majority of their cross-admits to, say, Harvard, in a way that does indicate most of their admits would prefer Harvard.
However, suppose you have, say, 5 colleges that each are around 50-50 in terms of getting cross-admits with each other, meaning there is no obvious dominant preference order. But if their cross-admits are often getting into 3-5 of these colleges, then their non-binding yield won’t be 50%, it will be significantly below that. Toss in losing some more to the Harvards and the like, and there you go–a fairly low non-binding yield.
But that doesn’t mean most of their cross-admits would not, say, prefer their college to the University of Texas, unless perhaps they happened to be Texan themselves (and perhaps not even then).
There are ways of trying to deal with some of this at least, but it is tricky business. There is, however, a study that once tried to sort this out. The data set they used is quite dated at this point, but it is still interesting to look at:
In terms of the very few top-ranked privates by this sort of approach, there is not such a discrepancy with raw non-binding yields. Cases like BYU and publics, though, rank a lot lower. And pretty quickly you get into privates which might fit into that category above (very well-regarded colleges that nonetheless often experience multiple other strong competitors for their admits, and who might lose the majority of cross-admits to those very top-ranked privates).
Certainly to those families choosing it. My co-worker has a Sophomore. I asked - are you going to start visits. His response - BYU baby!!
“It’s cheap, it’s well thought of, it’s got great sports, and why would anyone go anywhere else?”
So for his family - it’s always been the only option. For others - it would never be an option - so to them, maybe not prestigious…i.e. my kids would never even consider it (for obvious reasons - we are not members of the church).
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Which campus? BYU has campuses in Provo UT, Laie HI, and Rexburg ID.
If you are members of the CJCLDS, wouldn’t it be an option? Non-members are very unlikely to see it as an option.
I’m assuming only Provo - where dad went, before transferring out to UW, btw. That’s the funny thing.
Before you ask - Washington, not Wisconsin or Wyoming.
I think he meant “not” members of the LDS church.
ohhhhhh thx - will correct
I was just playing, so did not save results. My point was more that while US News uses a survey to determine prestige, I would like to see people put their money where their mouth is (and yield represents that somewhat), and then pull out the unfair influencers. I am not a stats guy so not the best to do the work, but I will continue to explore the theory.
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good share! similar to the way i am thinking. i may not want to go too far to carve out the “unfair influencers” of the yield. but ED is one big one.
Generally speaking this is typically called a revealed preference ranking, and I quite agree this approach tracks at least some conceptions of generic “prestige” better than most.
But there is a very basic problem that not everyone applies to every college. Indeed, not everyone who applied to any one college applied to the same other colleges. So it is really quite complicated to stitch together all these individual application and decision stories into a coherent picture.
And you would need a lot of constantly updated data to do something like an annual tracking study.
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It’d be interesting to tie cost to the yield. I agree with you in theory - but affordability has to weigh in too.
As folks get into multiple schools but can only attend one, how do they choose the one they attend. For many at the wealthy high end schools, they can and will pay anything. Or perhaps, they are paying little.
But if it’s an MIT full pay vs. say a UCLA in-state….etc. the calculus might be different…..
affordability may be the one yield determinant favoring the state schools, if I am understanding this right.
Not in every state.
Ask your friends in Pennsylvania….
Yes, I probably would not use affordability in my prestige model (that I may never create). I can think of lots of nuances.
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Yes, if a parent decides an in-state school is a better value than a $90K school, that might yield toward that in-state over the higher level. Or maybe there is a case where Case Western beats a higher level because of how much discount is given.
I like what you say about yield - that’s a great determinant - I don’t know about prestige but certainly shows that school is uber important to that student.
I’m just noting - there are other factors that go into yield and I’m assuming in many (not all) cases that affordability might be a significant factor. Of course, often times, those expensive heavyweights are cheaper with gift aid - so there’s not really any way to know the true answer.
But I like the path you went down.
Thanks. Low bar since US News survey might be the closest measure out there.
I think that is a large part of it, but there are also people who prefer their in-state universities for other reasons besides cost. Some people don’t want to be far from home. Some want to go to college with a lot of their HS friends. Some people have been fans of their sports teams and would be excited to be a student spectator. Some people intend to make a life in that state and are interested in their local networks. And so on.
If you were trying to control for all this, you could try to collect data solely on out-of-state yield. But that data may not be so easy to find.
Are you talking about the US News overall rankings, or their actual peer assessment surveys?
I’m always a bit amused that there are people who seem to favor the overall rankings as a “prestige” measure, versus the peer assessment surveys. At least the surveys are some sort of measure of something plausibly called prestige. Mixing that with something like Pell graduation rates is just adding noise to that signal.
I agree with you, but those students typically aren’t wasting their time applying out of state so wouldn’t be accepted and impacting yield. We know lots of kids who are one and done with the state flagship.
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I sometimes think of their survey (20% of their ranking) as “their” measure of prestige and for majors (100% of their ranking). Given that it is prestige according to other educators (and not parents and students), I think it is a very bad measure, even of that. If that gets pulled out of their rankings, the list would look somewhat different. I “think” it would change things even more drastically than when I am pulling out ED from yield.
And to your question, yes, I think many people look at US News as the prestige rankings. And this has nothing to do with the criteria, and that is why it annoys me.