<p>It’s kind of misleading to suggest that Chicago has a low yield. Chicago’s yield is low only compared with a tiny handful of colleges – the Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Notre Dame. It is basically the same as Caltech, Duke, Amherst, Swarthmore, Georgetown, and meaningfully higher than Northwestern, Washington University in St. Louis, or Johns Hopkins. If you adjust for the effect of Early Decision, it’s higher than all of the prestigious LACs, and basically the same as that of Cornell, Dartmouth, and Brown.</p>
<p>So, sure, it would be nice to tack on another 10% of yield to get into MIT range. But Chicago’s yield is “low” only in very rarefied company. I agree that Chicago should be challenging itself by that company (but in substance, not in admissions stats). It’s probably going to take another generation, though, to make up for the couple of generations of inattention to nurturing the College that created the gap in the first place.</p>
<p>I’ll also say that perfectly appropriate kids can make rational decisions to go someplace other than Chicago, even if there isn’t anything like a “mindshare” problem. In the past few years, I have seen children of friends – all of whom had applied to and been accepted at Chicago, all of whom knew my kids and multiple other kids they liked there – choose WashU, Tufts, Princeton, Brown, and Carleton over Chicago. It’s not that they disliked Chicago at all – in each of those cases, it turned out to be the second choice. But those other colleges had something to say for themselves as well, and presented their special qualities effectively, too.</p>