<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>