Why do UVA and Michigan have such low yields?

bclintonk
Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:10:30 +0000

Goldenboy8784:

How do you know that the majority of those people didn’t list Michigan, Duke as well as a host of other schools on their SAT exams and apply to all of these places?



I also think you vastly overestimate the degree to which college admissions is just a single national market in prestige. It is that for a few people; I mean something like a few thousand people, out of the hundreds of thousands who will enroll in college in the fall. But for most, other factors predominate. Geography, for example, plays a big role. Many Ohioans are satisfied with Ohio State, which is a pretty good school in many ways. If they want something better, there’s not much to choose from in-state: a few good LACs (Oberlin, Kenyon, and a few others). Case Western, but in some ways that’s not much of an improvement, if it is one at all, over Ohio State. So if they aim higher, many will look to better schools nearby. So what are some of the most popular options? Nearby Michigan (1,008 SAT score reports sent) is the #1 choice, followed by Northwestern (953, another Midwestern school), Harvard (772, popular everywhere), then Cornell (726, and just a few hours drive from the Cleveland area) and Notre Dame (653, just down the road in Indiana0. Notice a pattern here?

What about Illinoisans? They’ve got a very strong state flagship in UIUC, but if they want to aim a little higher they make Northwestern their top choice by far (1,789), followed by the ever-popular Harvard (1,133) and another hometown choice, Chicago (916). Stanford (902) and Princeton (897) are farther afield, but then air service is better from Chicago than from anywhere in Ohio. Then it’s back closer to home, with nearby WUSTL (895) and Michigan (788). Duke (423) is pretty far down their preference list, in pretty much a dead heat with UC Berkeley (419), Vanderbilt (419), Carnegie Mellon (413), and Georgetown (412). Makes you think there are maybe 400 or so prestige-obsessed kids in Illinois who are applying to all these schools.

I could give more examples, but the pattern is the same elsewhere: there’s a much stronger local and regional pattern to college applications, even at the very elite levels, than many people on CC seem to realize.