To your point, my S24 ended up with 15 applications, 9 acceptances overall. Probably excessive, but that is an 11% yield rate he threw into the averages.
Edit: By the way, he did a last-minute application to Middlebury. We never visited, he never expressed much interest. But his peers all freaked out after an admittedly rough ED/SCEA/REA round, a friend was going as a recruited athlete, and so he was sold on how an application to Middlebury would be easy to add to his list.
And they waitlisted him, and good for them! There was very little chance he would have gone there even if accepted, and I think they saw straight through him, and I think they were entirely right to not invest a full RD offer in him.
Among the LACs he actually did seriously consider (from before the panic period), he went 3/4, with the fourth being another waitlisting (and frankly, by that point he was fading on that one, so maybe they saw the same thing as Middlebury).
So then he chose none of those LACs, but even if he had chosen one, that is still only 33.3% yield.
Again this is just one kid, but I agree this is just a math issue at this point. So many applications, and so much uncertainty on both sides, means low yield rates in the end.
U Chicago is a âfitâ school. I can understand why they might have a preference for students who assert in the strongest way, by applying ED, that they believe this school is their best fit. (Their marketing extravagance is kind of crazy though.)
When we dug into the data before, what became clear is that most of the flow into Southern publics was actually coming from non-Southern publics, and often non-flagship Southern publics.
We know in fact enrollments are not down at Ivies, top LACs, and so on. We also know applications are not down, quite the opposite. So even if their regions are showing enrollment declines or application decreases, they arenât the colleges in those regions contributing to those effects.
Flagships is more of a mixed bag, but most of those are at least around even, and some are up. So that is also not where they are (mostly) coming from.
But non-flagship publicsâthose are often experiencing enrollment declines and application decreases.
And perhaps more local/lower-ranked privates too, but that data is not widely available in the same way. And also it probably wouldnât contribute much in relative terms, because they donât have the beginning populations to contribute as much.
All that saidâit is also clear that Internationals have, until recently, played a pretty big role in increasing application counts at a variety of colleges, particularly the ones that are globally famous and/or offer significant International aid. Whether that changes and how it affects these dynamics remains to be seen.
I cannot stand, and do not respect, the entirety of Chicagoâs admissions approach, which includes pressuring (âsuggestingâ) certain RD applicants to convert to ED, their deluge of marketing materials and now offering âSummer Student Early Notificationâ to students attending its Summer Program. The cost of the Summer Program is apparently $10,000 - $15,000. And no need based financial aid is available! Though there are some scholarships with a max value of $3,000. Sure skates close to pay to play in my opinion. Their tactics are beneath an institution that puports to be elite. So â tl/dr: ED at Chicago is part and parcel of sleazy admissions tactics.
This is not accurate. Summer Session programs range from one week to 8 weeks, some are in person, some are online only. Prices range from $2,500 to $14,490. There is need based aid available and plenty of students qualify. The school is specifically trying to attract disadvantaged students to these programs and need based aid helps them of that. All this info is found at this link:
I have no problem with Chicago (or any other school that competes with the most elite schools for students) choosing to offer multiple ED rounds that require a student to make a first choice. Things are competitive out there.
I donât know how anyone can be critical of Chicago taking too high proportion of students in ED when none of us know what that proportion is.
I remember there were a lot of yellow flashing warning lights in your first dozen or so replies to the âNESCAC Spoken Hereâ thread. Enough that I eventually asked whether LACs were high on your list of priorities. Your honest answer, as I recall, was, âNo.â
If a casual reader on an internet site can tell, Iâm pretty sure a seasoned adcom can also.
The student-athlete cohort is an interesting one in that not only do they comprise a huge portion of the ED population, but they also dictate the number of non-athletes each college needs to fill a class. The smallest NESCAC LACs (Amherst and Bowdoin) need the fewest to fill while the largest (Middlebury and Wesleyan) need the most.
Iâm not sure I would agree with that characterization. In the end, I was happy he included Vassar and Carleton among his three post-offer visits, and would have been happy if he had chosen them. And I think Carleton might have been his choice if he had not had WashU as an option.
That said, I do think NESCAC LACs in particular ended up not providing any really good fits for him. And to the extent I think that can be a reasonable outcome for some individuals puts me at odds with some others here, so be it.
Edit:
I believe these are the two exchanges in question.
It was early days then, but in fact we did go on to visit more LACs, my S24 did apply to a mix of LACs and universities, did post-offer visits to both, and it was only at the very last step he chose a university instead.
Of course perhaps that was always destined to be the case, but I am not so sure.
This jibes with my recollection. I felt you guys were trying to hedge your bets. And I agree that it is representative of a fairly common dilemma: how to find that Goldilocks combination of not too big but not too small.
This is such a common dilemma. Mine ultimately chose a NESCAC but both MIT and WashU (along with a couple of other LACs and small R1s) were in mix right up until the end and I canât say that I was sure what the decision would be until the very end.
I think in his case, he truly did not know exactly what he wanted at the time he was applying. He is a very cautious decision maker, and wanted to give different options a longer look before deciding.
Iâm obviously a bit biased, but I do think this is often indicative of a healthy attitude toward college choice. Not of course if you are petrified with anxiety. But if you take basically all the time available to gather more information and reflect, that seems pretty sensible to me.
Of course sometimes it just clicks somewhere too. Thatâs also fine.
The point being, by the time Amherst gets to the RD round, they are already inundated with HYP rejects from the January decision period (which itself is a tipoff as to the applicantâs priorities.) They donât fill as much of their class from ED as Middlebury, but as stated upstream, they donât have to since they have far fewer non-athletic slots to fill. All things being equal, which application do you think theyâre going to look upon more favorably, the one listing 9 medium-sized universities as competitors or the one with 8 or 9 LACs all of which they outrank on the USNews poll? Adcoms are human, too.
Theyâd have to guess this though, right? Because I donât think they are actually told this information.
And of course my S24 did in fact get into a variety of LACs, so those humans were fine with what they saw. None quite as highly ranked by US News as Amherst, but then wouldnât that mean they should logically think they had even less chance of him yielding, if they somehow knew he would be getting competitive university offers too?
Again this is just one kid, but I do think part of what happened is my S24 got into the LACs where there was actually more effort involved in applying, and he was in fact sincerely more interested, and I think they could tell he was serious about considering them.
It is quite interesting to me that LACs like Middlebury, and in fact Amherst and Williams and others, make it relatively easy to apply. I wonder if they have found things like unusual supplementals arenât really improving on what their yield models say otherwise.
I also wonder if what you are suggesting about lots of kids using LACs as Ivy League backups is maybe more specific to some LACs than others. That wasnât what my S24 was thinking, and he didnât apply to all the Ivies, and two out of the three he did apply to were among the late addition applications he didnât prefer to his top non-Ivy colleges anyway.
So I donât know for sure, but it would not surprise me if fewer kids who are applying to all the Ivies and seeing a college like Amherst as a backup actually apply to, say, Carleton at all. Maybe a few, but then Carleton DOES have quirky supplements, and maybe for them that actually helps figure out which kids are thinking like that, versus which are seriously considering them.
Sure, I think Midd/Amh/Will/Bowd, Wes, etc. care about yield. But I donât think they are obsessed with it. They know they will yield 20-35% of kids in RD. They admit high stats/achievement students on the whole, and they also enroll these type of kids. They know they will lose some to other LACs, Ivies, and other academic schools. Itâs the way it is. But itâs not like they are losing the enrollment game. Their enrolled classes have never been stronger.
They donât use ED just to enhance yield from a stats perspective - ED is useful so these smaller schools can hit their institutional priorities for athletics, FGLI, and other school programming and diversity targets.
As for Amherst - I donât think its AOs are afraid of extending offers to high academic kids who may have other elite offers in RD. They win some, maybe lose some, but if you are yielding 25% of amazing admits, you are still going to have an incredible freshman class. It wins some elite university battles, and also knows that not all great applicants will have a ton of elite university offers, because the RD stats are so tight these days. It can yield kids from both buckets.
When does Amherst yield protect? I honestly donât know. I do know it extends offers to great students who may end up with multiple elite offers. I think Iâve seen it yield protect in RD with some boarding schools - but even then, itâs hard to say for sure when itâs yield protection, because with only 250 RD spots available, it is looking to admit a diverse class, regionally, socio-economically, etc. What the prep kids think is yield protection at a NESCAC can just be the school saying âwe have enough full-pay N.E. kids, we want the FGLI from New Mexico instead.â
And when a prep school counselor says âyou need to ED to Middlebury, otherwise you have a slim chanceâ, itâs not necessarily because of yield protection. Preps donât have a monopoly on good applicants. The strong preps still have a >15% RD admit rate at Midd, which is higher than the national average. It may be the counselor trying to increase a kidâs odds by using ED strategically at schools that give a bump to ED.
Correct. Colleges do not know where else an applicant has applied.
Many many students can not apply ED because of finances. They need to wait to see merit offers and/or want to compare offers across colleges. This is the reason many people do not support colleges offering ED simply because it gives an advantage to those who can/are willing to pay full price. I do support applying ED if one needs aid and the NPC suggests affordability.
Separately, at a school like Middlebury which does not require an essay, I expect students who add the school to their common app list at or on the RD deadline donât do well in admissions unless they fit some criteria the school is still seeking in RD. (Colleges can see when an applicant adds a school to their common app list.) IMO the vast majority of highly rejective colleges practice yield protection.
Which, of course, brings us back to your maiden post on the âNESCAC Spoken Hereâ thread:
I think had you just considered the fact of geographic proximity alone, it would have been clear that the NESCAC colleges biggest overlaps were with the ivies and with each other.
I donât disagree. I just donât know the extent of practice. I also donât know of a good definition of âyield protectionâ.
What may look like yield protection may be the school looking for a good fit that goes beyond an excellent application.
Is it âwe arenât going after this great applicant because they will be too sought afterâ?
There is tremendous cross-over between most NESCACs and elite universities, so conservative yield protection must have its limitations.
And itâs not unusual for an amazing student to be rejected by multiple/many elite unis, so it would be a mistake for NESCACs to not go after this kind of student. And based on the enrolled classes of NESCACs, they seem to be crushing it.
Anyway, I am curious how nuanced/blunt the alleged yield protection practice is at the various NESCACs. Knocking a kid out because they added Bates at the last minute to the College App - I get it. But being afraid to extend an offer to an amazing candidate - I donât know, I see a lot of amazing in the NESCACs, some non-amazing at the elite unis, and a bunch in between. There is a lot of crossover, IMO.
(Perhaps another type of yield protection is the waitlist/offer and maybe Midd Feb admits.)