Why do UVA and Michigan have such low yields?

bclintonk
Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:33:08 +0000

goldenboy8784:

I suspect that you are underestimating how much high school seniors care about prestige and external validation. A lot of the valedictorians/salutatorians will just apply across the board among the top 15 USNWR schools and see where they get in; after that, they usually pick the school that’s perceived to be more prestigious or revert to fit if society deems all of their choices to be on the same level reputation wise.



I think you’re vastly overestimating how narcissistic and prestige-obsessed the nation’s valedictorians and salutatorians are. Look, there are a little over 30,000 high schools in the U.S., which means roughly that many vals and roughly that many sals. That’s 60,000 people right there, which is roughly double the number of applicants any Ivy gets–and we know for sure that not everyone who applies to an Ivy is val or sal.

Brown, for example, tells us. Of the 33,707 applicants to Brown in 2011, 1,883 were vals and 880 were sals. (Odd there were so many more vals than sals; hmm, maybe the vals are more narcissistic). In any event, vals and sals made up just 8.2% of the applicants to Brown. That’s roughly 4.6% of the vals and sals in the nation—a non-trivial fraction, to be sure, but more than 95% of them didn’t apply to Brown.

Now I suspect the prestige-chasers make up more than 5% of the vals and sals. Some especially narcissistic ones think they’re too good for Brown. Others might prefer Duke to Brown and per my hypothesis not bother to apply to Brown; since the odds of getting into Brown appear to be even longer than the odds of getting into Duke, why have Brown on your back-up list if your top choice is Duke? So maybe 10% or even 15% of the vals and sals are in this prestige-chasing game. But the rest aren’t. Many will have their state flagship as their top choice. Others will prefer LACs. Some will prefer a school with a religious affiliation. Or look for the best engineering program they can get into, be it public or private (and many, many of the best engineering programs are at public universities, while many of the prestige-laden privates are actually pretty second-rate in engineering). Others will have geographic preferences or other “fit” factors that take precedence over prestige. But in any event, I’m quite certain it’s a minority, and probably a quite small majority, who place prestige above all else in their college search.

And a rather pathetic minority at that.