And because I am an LAC grad myself, I just have to play devil’s advocate; isn’t a large part of the NIH’s function to dole out grant money to smaller teams of scientists? And doesn’t the “A” in M&A stand for the acquisition of other people’s ideas?
1 Like
I don’t think you and I disagree. Small teams are a critical part of the ecosystem. I just think that the author has made some credulous assumptions about AI—that it will take care of scaling—and as a result made a flawed logical leap to his solution (more founders and small groups, less dependence on big companies/government). It reminds me of the tech disrupter hand-waving that helped get us into our current predicament.
AI won’t magically scale things. Humans need to rebuild institutions. And that work is at least as important as small, nimble groups’ moving fast and breaking things.
So my take is that LACs don’t need to panic, and they don’t need to pivot. They are great at what they do, and we’ll need even more of what they do in the coming decades.
2 Likes
That athletes also fit the model of “team players” goes without saying.
And back to our normal rah-rah content - congrats to Tufts for winning the NCAA DIII Women’s Rowing Championship and Trinity for winning the IRA DIII Men’s Rowing Championship!
10 Likes
Another large factor is how heavily schools rely on ED to fill their classes, since ED admits (theoretically…) provide a yield of 100%.
For that reason, to get the “real” competitive yield of a school, we should only be looking at the RD round. (if the CDS provides the necessary info…)
But what is the “real” yield, anyway?
For example, is a state flagship’s yield, whatever it is, truly representative of preference? Many students are headed to their flagship come hell or high water no matter what, and for a variety of circumstances, many of them economic.
Another example could be how well informed the student happens to be. Sure, they prefer what they prefer, which factors into yield, but I can tell you anecdotally that my home state is full of kids who have never heard of Williams College and who would never, therefore, consider attending over, say, Gonzaga. So, yeah, that’s a preference that factors into yield, but I’m not sure it means anything to someone like me.
There are yield numbers that tell a story, and others that also tell a story, but a different one.
3 Likes
Right – I wouldn’t compare state schools to LACs, or even far-apart LACs (in terms of yield…), for those reasons.
But if we wanted to compare the competitive yield of, say, the NESCAC and Patriot League schools, that’s how I would do it – look at RD yield.
1 Like
I see your logic, but if that school had no ED, theoretically they would have yielded all the ED applicants and would have ended up at the blended number. In that case, what they do is valid.
1 Like
The CDS does provide sufficient information to calculate RD yield. The figure may not be pretty, however — 17% for one NESCAC I viewed.
Or at least a lot of them. A portion of the ED spot are bartering with the school: yield certainty for help in admissions. If there were no such exchange of benefits, then some of the ED population might prefer to explore the options and might not ultimately choose the [what was] ED school. But your point is also true: some kid said, “yes, I want the increased admission probability of admission to this school because I want to attend this school.”
2 Likes
Without going too far down the admissions yield rabbit hole, you also have to take into account that as the kids who ED improve the yield at the schools where they matriculate, they also don’t depress it at the schools where they would have submitted RD applications had ED not been an option.
2 Likes
I have always thought this, even when price points were appreciably lower. It is a luxury good. When Michael Roth says the LAC model is still the gold standard, he really means the “gold” part. There are much more efficient means of educating people. From a social good perspective, perhaps we should be taking much better advantage of economies of scale and not bestowing such a lavish amount of educational resources on so few people. For God’s sake, Williams can quite literally be two separate very well resourced schools with its endowment. There are 2.5 nicely funded LACs in Williamstown.
That’s why, whenever circuitrider and I talk about these things offline, and he can vouch for this, my refrain is that it’s all about the war chest. Even with an endowment closing in on $1.7 billion for a 2900 student school, I tend focus a lot on Wes’ funding; the future of this kind of school is tied to its ability to finance its own inefficient delivery of education to a lucky few. To borrow from another poster here when talking about Princeton’s wealth, “it’s never enough.”
2 Likes
Since it’s been brought up, I thought I’d look into RD yield. It seems AI thinks about it as I do, and offers the following:
Accepting that as the appropriate calculation method, and instructing the tool to limit its data pull from each school’s most recent CDS publication (and specifically to not pull data from CC, which it seems to like to do), it spat out the following table. Note, I’m using AI because, as much as I love this thread and the topics we bring up, I don’t love them enough to go do the work myself given its relative lack of importance.
[Screw it. The tool continues to err in its data pull, so I’m pulling the table.]
One good point that the tool made, which makes intuitive sense, is that the more you use ED to fill your class, the lower your RD yield is going to be because the RD pool becomes so competitive that they’re going to have many other attractive options. So, it’s not necessarily a scarlet letter to have a low RD yield if it’s being largely driven by how much the school admits through early binding decision.
1 Like
Business, Business, Business. No other careers exist, no other careers are worth mentioning.
This article is so steeped in that ideology, that the only way that it thinks that LACs can deal with AI is by doing stuff that allows their graduates to keep on having careers in business. What is their GREAT SOLUTION? Entrepreneurship classes. So that the gradates can keep on having careers in Business.
This sentence encapsulated the entire mindset (italics and bolding mine):
Because the author believers that the ONLY jobs that LAC graduates should ever be looking for, and the only jobs for which LACs should prepare their graduates for, are Corporate Jobs.
When he writes
He doesn’t talk about LAC graduates working as healthcare workers, or developing the solutions for climate change as climate scientists or engineers - jobs that AI cannot do. He believes that all of these services should be provided by corporations, and that the only jobs that LAC graduates should ever be doing are as the corporate executives for corporations that will provide services.
I wish that I could be charitable and assume that he believes that some of these corporations should be non-profits, but nothing in his history tells me that this is the case.
Then there is a not-so-subtle elitism there as well.
7 Likes
Which is why I say, so much depends on where they are losing overlaps. Numerically speaking, it’s bound to be the “regional powerhouses” (as a Wesleyan adcom recently confided in me) which tend to be much bigger, R1 universities.
1 Like
I agree. And the interesting thing about that is that I don’t think the LACs with business programs (Skidmore comes to mind) are doing any better, if even as well, as many LACs without them.
4 Likes
Skidmore’s business program (and the degree to which they were touting it during our visit) was one main reason neither D23 nor S26 chose to apply. Then again, my kids might have been more LAC-minded than average (both are or about to be at NESCACs), so they might be more the exception than the rule.
2 Likes
Trying Again. I manually pulled from the latest CDS report from each school. Colby doesn’t publish one (I don’t believe), so they are excluded.
Here’s the raw data:
Wesleyan – ED 502, Total Enrolled 825 and Total Admitted 2373
Hamilton – ED 315, Total Enrolled 478 and Total Admitted 1210
Middlebury – ED 460, Total Enrolled 634 and Total Admitted 1511
Bates – ED 318, Total Enrolled 493 and Total Admitted 1433
Bowdoin, ED 296, Total Enrolled 515 and Total Admitted 957
Conn College, ED 222, Total Enrolled 459 and Total Admitted 2875
Amherst, ED 216, Total Enrolled 485 and Total Admitted 1222
Williams, ED 256, Total Enrolled 567 and Total Admitted 1336
Trinity, ED 261, Total Enrolled 478 and Total Admitted 2148
Tufts, ED 1071, Total Enrolled 1765 and Total Admitted 3613
Here’s the table:
Recalculated Admissions Metrics
| School | ED Percentage of Enrolled Class | Regular Decision Yield Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| Middlebury | 72.6% | 16.6% |
| Hamilton | 65.9% | 18.2% |
| Bates | 64.5% | 15.7% |
| Wesleyan | 60.8% | 17.3% |
| Tufts | 60.7% | 27.3% |
| Bowdoin | 57.5% | 33.1% |
| Trinity | 54.6% | 11.5% |
| Conn College | 48.4% | 8.9% |
| Williams | 45.1% | 28.8% |
| Amherst | 44.5% | 26.7% |
Note that this approach assumed an ED yield of 100%.
Not sure what else to do but assume so. I’m guessing that deviations from 100% yield for ED are infrequent and immaterial.
I’m open to suggestions.