All this focus on yield is completely misplaced. It was always a flawed statistic to some degree, but these days when students are applying to 12, 15 even 20 schools it means almost nothing. @Alxeandre doesn’t quite get it right when he says
That may be true within a narrow peer group, but all one has to do is look at the yield for Yale (about 67%) and the University of Nebraska (about 63%). http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2015/01/21/national-universities-where-the-most-accepted-students-enroll
Yale has an admit rate of 6.9% http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/lowest-acceptance-rate While Nebraska has an admit rate of 64% http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/university-of-nebraska-2565
So in the end the more telling stat would be who chooses which school among a set of schools where they have been cross-admitted. But that statistic is not available in a comprehensive manner, as far as I know. But it is well known that UMich gets a lot of cross-applicants with the top 30 privates, but for OOS is just as expensive (more after private’s FA in most cases). So naturally they lose a lot of those admitted after the applicant sees all their options, if the applicant is OOS. It has nothing to do with quality and everything to do with state law. After all, why would the taxpayers of Michigan want to give their money away to people from the other 49 states? Heck, in California the taxpayers are moaning and groaning about the $32 million that the UC system uses for OOS (including internationals) for financial aid, even though I recently demonstrated that for the entire UC system that is only about $1,300 per student, while OOS total cost is almost $60,000 per student. They make money on OOS attendees. I am sure UMich does as well.
So @BeCambridge I think you can see that your knowledge and assumptions of the admissions process relative to overall quality of schools is quite flawed. In the case of certain state universities such as Michigan, UNC-CH, UC Berkeley, etc. that are considered top state schools that attract a lot of OOS applicants (but can only take so many per state law in most cases) the yield is quite different relative to admit rate than a Nebraska or Alaska-Anchorage where the vast majority of applicants are in state students that have little intention of attending elsewhere if accepted.
Oh, and it was only few years ago the private schools ranked in the top 15 sometimes had admit rates of 20-25%. Again, the Common App. along with heavier marketing, has made that obsolete. But it remains that comparing a state school’s admit rate to an elite private is a foolish thing, even for the best state schools. UCLA, who for years has gotten the most applications of any school in the country, has the lowest state school admit rate at about 21%. Not that different than UMich. So for a state school, a 20-30% admit rate is actually very highly selective.