Yield for AB Duke scholarship falls

Colleges & Universities Duke University
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<p>[Scholarship</a> yields reflect competition | The Chronicle](<a href=“http://www.dukechronicle.com/articles/2013/05/23/scholarship-yields-reflect-competition]Scholarship”>http://www.dukechronicle.com/articles/2013/05/23/scholarship-yields-reflect-competition)</p>

<p>A.B. Duke Scholarship yield dropped this year from 65% to 36%. The excuses for this are the most bizarre I’ve seen from any admissions department.</p>

<p>Among the excuses:</p>

<ul>
<li><p>A claim that “the A.B. Duke Scholarship is competing for the first time with other universities, not on financial value but on the value of the program”. The implication here is that the A.B. Duke Scholarship wasn’t competing against other schools in the past, and suddenly, it is. This makes no sense. HYPSM have always had great financial aid, so presumably, even if the A.B. Duke Scholarship were given to more lower-class individuals in the past, such individuals would have also had great scholarship packages from HYPSM.</p></li>
<li><p>Horrible weather: Potential students could have been deterred from choosing Duke because the weather on campus was “horrible” during Blue Devil Days. Really? Weather has been crazy all over the country this year, not just Duke. Even so, most other elites are seeing their yields rise.</p></li>
</ul>

<p>And the most bizarre of them all:</p>

<ul>
<li>That the Boston bombings pulled more students from Duke to Harvard this year. ??? How does violence and instability near Harvard equate to more students picking Harvard over Duke? Rosenberg’s explanation: Harvard had to cancel its student weekend, so more students simply chose Harvard due to the idealistic picture they had of Harvard in their heads. If that were true, then why doesn’t Harvard just cancel its student weekend every year? It’s hilarious that this excuse was ever brought to the table, much less posted in an article in the school newspaper. Alumni should be outraged by the incompetence on display here.</li>
</ul>

<p>Year after year, Duke is forced to come up with new admissions excuses and to twist statistics most unnaturally. For instance, this year, instead of announcing the overall acceptance rate, Duke administrators announced that the RD admit rate had gone below 10% (probably in an attempt to pretend that their total admit rate was below 10%). Duke’s yield this year will likely fall to 40%, and I have to wonder if admissions will even make an announcement of the yield. Maybe they’ll make an announcement of students admitted ED to pretend like the school is making progress. Can you imagine? “Record 99% of Early Decision admits choose to enroll in Duke!”. </p>

<p>I’ve been saying this for years now, but Duke alumni should really be concerned when their administration starts resorting to such measures. Obviously, these are all excuses for Duke’s recent drop: Duke’s yield is now lower than Northwestern’s. Its yield is 13 percentage points below UChicago’s (55% to 42%), and literally half of Harvard’s (82% to 42%). Duke alumni really need to step up and demand some changes from administration; it’s getting to the point that Duke might not even be considered a top 15 university in 5 years.</p>

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<p>Lighten up, Francis.</p>

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<p>Nice controversy-sounding subject to get the views - obviously, you’re not a fan of Duke, that’s fine. All of those quotes are NOT from the admissions office. It’s simply a professor, Alex Rosenberg, who directs the scholarship program. I don’t think a difference of SEVEN students in a class of over 1600 is a concern to most constituents; certainly not to me.</p>

<p>You know that UChicago had a >50% acceptance rate just like 10 years ago, right? Did you think UChicago was a terrible university then? (It’s a rhetorical question, no need to answer. Obviously, it was still a quality institution even with such a “poor” acceptance rate for an elite university.)</p>

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<p>My opinion-Kids are applying to so many schools (10-20) that for the elite students, Duke is little more than a safety school. There’s probably not a lot that it can do unless it wants to go heads up with the likes of HYPS</p>

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<p>How come Duke hasn’t released its yield rate yet? Or if they have, could someone post the link here? I haven’t been able to find it anywhere…</p>

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<p>Duke is not a safety by any means. However, offering this scholarship to people with a financial need is the wrong way to go about it. Duke provides FA already and so what is the point of giving a full scholarship to students who meet the full need anyway?</p>

<p>They should be luring other top candidates who don’t get as much money as FA in other places using this scholarship. This is what other schools with give out merit money are doing.</p>

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<p>Okay, I’m going to type this really slow so folks can follow along. Duke admitted 753 kids in ED this year and 2897 in RD. They got 31,785 apps and were shooting for a class of 1705. All of these numbers are published and findable in ten seconds of searching. From there, you can do the math yourself by adding only one assumption. I went to state school, but since y’all seem so helpless, let me give it a go. </p>

<p>Duke accepted a total of 3650 over both rounds. (Agreed? Check me with your own calculator. I’m not an HYPS guy.). That means the overall blended acceptance rate – which is meaningless but is the one reported to US News – was 11.48%. </p>

<p>Of those 3650 acceptances, Duke wanted 1705 to enroll. That implies a blended yield rate of about 46%. Here, we note that yield could be a bit lower if Duke hit the wait list hard, but based on the traffic here at CC, it looks like they may have gone about 10-15 kids deep for Pratt and even less than that for Trinity. Not worth schvitzing over IMO. </p>

<p>To do more meaningful analysis, now we need to make one assumption – that ED yield was 95% because the FA just didn’t work for some kids. That sounds roughly right to somewhat conservative based on what I’ve read. That would put the ED haul at 715 and leave Duke looking for 990 kids in RD. Backfitting against a the 2897 RD acceptances, that means they were expecting an RD-only yield of about 34% – and, coincidentally (not!), that is exactly what Dean Guttentag told me they were expecting in RD yield when I asked him about this at Blue Devil Days. </p>

<p>If he were running a yield maximization machine, the policy course here would be clear. They would ramp up ED even more and go to WashU style RD. But that isn’t the type of freshman class he has been asked to assemble, and if you actually saw these kids, you’d be pretty damned excited about the one we’ve got.</p>

<p>So, I advise those of you worried about this to replace the batteries in your calculators and, more importantly, ask yourselves whether you really believe that Duke entering classes are getting WORSE. I don’t. And that matters to me a lot more than the trivial arithmetic here.</p>

<p>Or, to sum up for the TL;DR crowd, lighten up, Francis.</p>

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<p>SomeOldGuy: Your careful analysis should lessen the schvitzing going on here.</p>

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<p>How many other elite schools are on the Common App? That could lead to more students applying to Duke even if it’s not a top choice for them.</p>

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<p>Basically, every top school except Georgetown is on the Common App. Columbia was one of the the last hold outs and added it a few years ago (which led to a considerable increase in their applications).</p>

<p><a href=“https://www.commonapp.org/CommonApp/Members.aspx[/url]”>https://www.commonapp.org/CommonApp/Members.aspx&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>But Duke is on the Common App. what are we questioning here? Am I missing something?</p>

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<p>AB Duke was offered to students who needed full FA, students who didn’t need any FA, and students in between. Of the 14 who declined the scholarship, they chose either Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, or MIT. Duke only lost out to top schools, but even with the offer of an amazing scholarship, it still did lose out…</p>

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<p>“who needed full FA, students who didn’t need any FA, and students in between”</p>

<p>"“This year the students who chose not to accept our offer all enrolled in either Harvard, Stanford, Princeton or MIT, whose financial aid programs in recent years have matched, or in some cases exceeded, even those of the A.B. Duke program.” "</p>

<p>It sounds like none of the full need people took it?</p>

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<p>I think there were students who needed no FA and students who needed full FA and others in between who didn’t take the scholarship. I specifically know of a student who needed no FA and a student who needed some FA and both ended up choosing Stanford.</p>

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<p>We are talking about a sample size of 22 people. I think it is futile to compare yield rates from year to year with such a small group.</p>

<p>Also, as others have pointed out, I don’t think this small group has much impact on the university as a whole.</p>

<p>

LOL. You obviously just don’t like Duke and are looking for any reason to criticize the university.</p>