Roughneck16 OP t1_jaukc32 wrote on March 4, 2023 at 4:28 AM

SOURCES

METHODOLOGY

Excel

WHAT IS YIELD?

Yield is the percentage of accepted students who choose to enroll. If a university has a high yield rate, it’s more likely to be the first choice of the students who apply there.

HOW WELL DOES ACCEPTANCE RATE PREDICT YIELD?

With a coefficient of determination of 0.51, we know that 51% of the variance in the yield can be predicted using the acceptance rate. That's a strong negative correlation. Basically, the lower the percentage of applicants admitted, the more likely those applicants will choose to enroll.

But, of course, some schools buck that trend. By using a line of best fit to project the predicted outcomes and subtracting it from the observed outcomes, we can see the residuals. Here are the top 20 universities in which students seem unusually eager to enroll:

+	University	Residual
1	Brigham Young University	52.88%
2	Gallaudet University	36.28%
3	Yeshiva University	31.75%
4	Harvard University	31.25%
5	Princeton University	30.25%
6	University of Chicago	29.19%
7	Stanford University	28.25%
8	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	25.25%
9	University of Pennsylvania	24.19%
10	University of Utah	21.66%
11	Texas A&M University-College Station	20.21%
12	Yale University	19.72%
13	Dartmouth College	19.19%
14	University of Kansas	18.26%
15	Iowa State University	17.80%
16	University of Oklahoma	17.00%
17	Brown University	15.19%
18	Cornell University	14.58%
19	University of Missouri	14.27%
20	Arizona State University-Tempe	13.40%

In other words, BYU's yield is a full 52.88 points above where it should be when you consider its relatively high acceptance rate. That’s unsurprising considering how BYU is a niche school sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. LDS students only have to pay ~$3k per semester to attend. Students also have to sign a strict honor code, which scares away many non-LDS applicants. Yeshiva and Notre Dame are also religious schools, for the Jewish and Roman Catholic faiths, respectively. All three of these religions emphasize endogamy (marrying their own kind) so it should come as no surprise that many students meet their significant other while attending. Gallaudet University is also an interesting outlier, as it’s a school for the deaf.

You may be surprised to see Ivy League schools on this list, considering how they have such low acceptance rates. Keep in mind: admissions to elite colleges isn’t a strict meritocracy. Of course, you have to have sky-high grades and test scores to be considered, but beyond that, it’s a crap shoot. It’s possible for someone to have the perfect application and still get into only one if any Ivy League school. And when you consider how most of these students either have rich parents or get generous need-based assistance, most choose to enroll whichever one lets them in.

WHICH SCHOOLS HAVE LOWER-THAN-PREDICTED YIELDS?

Using that same line of best fit, here are the bottom 20 residuals:

+	University	Residual
1	University of California-Santa Barbara	-24.10%
2	Case Western Reserve University	-23.63%
3	University of California-Irvine	-19.10%
4	University of California-San Diego	-18.77%
5	Clark University	-18.24%
6	University of Miami	-17.56%
7	Boston University	-16.76%
8	California State University-Long Beach	-16.71%
9	Fordham University	-15.58%
10	Binghamton University	-15.11%
11	Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute	-14.91%
12	University of Rochester	-14.50%
13	Loyola Marymount University	-14.17%
14	University of California-Santa Cruz	-14.12%
15	Emory University	-13.55%
16	Stony Brook University	-13.24%
17	Villanova University	-12.96%
18	Pepperdine University	-12.91%
19	University of Denver	-12.79%
20	University of California-Davis	-12.78%

My guess is that many of the high-performing students who get into these schools decline to enroll because they don’t offer adequate financial aid, or they get better offers elsewhere.

DOES THE RANKING ALSO PREDICT THE YIELD?

It does. The coefficient of determination between rank and yield is 0.41, which is a significant predictor although somewhat less so than the acceptance rate. I’m reluctant to use the USNWR rankings as they are arbitrary and unscientific. Also, there are quite a few ties in there.

Asking which is the “top school” is like asking which animals make better pets: cats or dogs?