“Last round of admissions went out in early April and the enrolment reduction was tracking well per historical yield rate, until ‘April 25’ happened nationwide,” Chiang’s post reads. “Then suddenly in the following two weeks, about 1,600 additional, beyond all historical yield rate expectation, high school seniors and their families leaning toward other universities in Indiana and in other states pivoted to accept Purdue’s admission instead.”
For incoming freshmen, it appears the university is looking to alleviate the housing crunch by moving upper classmen so hopefully it won’t impact freshmen housing.
For those unfamiliar with Purdue, they have miscalculated yield the last few cycles so were purposefully targeting an enrollment reduction (as noted in the quote). 1600 additional students beyond yield is significant!
Always amazes me how the alleged best and brightest, those educating our kids, get so much wrong in so many areas whether yield, budget, PR, and more.
Maybe they’ll do like Tampa the other year - pay to defer for housing sake.
Guess kids will have to ratchet up the Purdue expectation - gonna become reachier for the engineers and reachy for some of the other majors (arts & sciences) as they try to balance out the overall population.
UIUC also miscalculated their yield and have a housing shortage for freshmen. They are offering $2,000 and 100 meal tickets to upperclassmen who aren’t required to live in housing to move out and reallocating those rooms to the incoming class.
They’re also giving RAs a temporary freshman roommate! Yikes!
I would suspect that, rather than the university itself, the yield modeling is performed by enrollment management consultants. It seems to me, as a parent observer, the industry has has a rough go the several years.
My opinion is that the lack of affordable off-campus/student apartment housing is also a contributing factor. Upperclassmen are finding it cheaper to just live in the dorms for longer. My university town has a had a boom of upscale student apartment buildings, but the price point is unmanageable for many. I’m talking granite countertops, floor to ceiling windows in high rises with rooftop pools, fitness centers, computer lounges and other amenities. They are tearing down more affordable options to build these.
Not only that. We are facing this mess with oldest at Gatech.
GT decided again to expand freshman class. That absolutely messed up students graduating in December and the ones who want to study a semester abroad. They have no place to go. All student apartments have yearly contract with no option to break it. Non-college ones have astronomical cost and not all students can move far from school and drive through crazy traffic in Atlanta every day (and some do not have a car). In addition, some students have what I call schedule with holes (classes spread from morning to night with big holes in between) and work on campus. As a result, I have at this point a student 2 weeks before classes with no place to live… We are working on some options but she may end up skipping a semester…Not fun at all.
One of the reasons S23 didn’t apply to Perdue was the triples and lounges made into rooms that we had heard of in previous years of over enrollment.
It felt like this year they were trying to push more kids toward the “new” (but not new) Indy campus that they released very little information about (all "coming in July). I wonder if they just got caught with their pants down somehow.
my d23 looked at purdue last year ; and i just dont think she would have been interested in the new campus this year. There’s such a fine line on it all, right? I’m guessing the programs are the same; the teaching and curriculum the same; but the experience would be so different for the kids; and that’s really such a part of choosing a college. I am curious to see how it goes for them; if kids chose that purdue name and opps but at the new campus over a typical college experience.
I think kids would have been much more open to the new campus if they did tours and had a “product” earlier. Everything kept saying “coming in July”. For kids that wanted a less isolated or smaller campus than West Lafayette it may have been a viable option, but July was way too late for kids to make a decisions. And let’s face it. Kids accepted to Perdue probably had other good options at schools that had revisit days or at least tours. Selling a “new” university is tough and they did not go about it well. We knew kids that were on the waitlist and said they would have been open to the Indy campus if they could find any info on it.
(Although, obviously, Perdue didn’t need to worry about going to the waitlist for the WL campus).
Tried. Nothing around campus. There are hundreds of students in that situation.
We need 4 months lease. Good luck with that… I can’t afford to pay $10k for 4 months.
This has been quite the debacle. Most of the kids we know at Purdue have been affected. Some are still up in the air about what is going on, partly because the various portals have had lots of glitches so there has been a lot of uncertainty about housing assignments.
I know a few students who were punted to off-campus housing miles away and given a free parking pass (but the students don’t have cars). It looks like they might be able to stay in their original assignments (but may have additional roommates added, e.g… doubles converted to triples?)
I understand the FAFSA disaster really messed up a lot of schools this year. However, this is yet another year of several that Purdue understimated yield (by a lot). The students are growing weary and are grumbling a lot about resources being stretched. It’s probably time to thaw the tuition freeze and to decrease admissions. The in-state kids on need-based aid should still pay the same, which is important.
My D doesn’t know anyone impacted. Is it becoming more common for upperclassmen to stay in campus?
FWIW I do think it’s better for freshmen to be housed closer to campus than upper classmen. My D took the bus for a semester junior year and it worked out fine.
Maybe it’s just the kids we know, but they like the convenience of living on campus and the housing crunch has made the off-campus offerings harder to navigate. In one case, they punted my kid’s friend to an apartment 3 miles from campus and she doesn’t have a car. That was just too much for her.
Totally agree about freshmen living on campus. I hope they can turn the tide on the escalating housing troubles.
