Skip to main content

Yes, your yield rate is still falling



In 2015, I wrote this post on falling yield rates.  It was pretty obvious to many of us in the profession that this trend was widespread, and largely driven by a dramatic increase in applications against a more modest increase in actual students who could or would enroll.

It apparently wasn't so obvious to everyone.  Response was much stronger than I thought it would be, and I never had seen so many requests from people who wanted to share it with their trustees (btw, this is public; you never have to ask permission to share).

So I redid it, using trend data from 2005 to 2018.  First a couple of definitions:


  • Admit rate is the percentage of applicants who were offered admission (admits/applicants).
  • Yield rate is the percentage of admitted students who enroll (enrollers/admits).
  • Draw rate is not commonly known, and I wish I remember who first mentioned it to me in the 1980's.  It stuck with me and is a valuable metric, I think, as we attempt to measure market position.  It's Yield Rate/Admit Rate, and it sorts out the super-selective places even within the category.  For example, The Average Draw Rate is about .46; Stanford's is 18, and Dartmouth's is about 7.  It's intended to punish institutions who artificially inflate application numbers to appear to be more selective, as yield usually drops when you do that.  Of course, now many colleges manipulate this (even if they don't know it) by using ED, ED2, EA, etc. to drive yield higher.
  • The universe is about 2,000 four-year public and private, not-for-profit institutions that report admissions data to IPEDS.  Open admissions institutions are not required to do so.
There are just two views on this.  The first shows two charts.  On the top, you see the total applications, admits, and enrolling students over time.  Use the control at top right (purple box) to change the value on the blue line to show admit, yield, or draw, as you like.  The bottom chart shows the percentage increase since 2005 of those same numbers.

If you don't want to look at the whole universe, use the filters (orange boxes).  You can choose any subset of institutions you wish: Public institutions in the Southeast, for instance; or Doctoral institutions; or even a single institution if that's what you want.

The second tab (across the top) is for Enrollment people or anyone who wants to compare one institution to another.  Choose your focus institution on the top chart (Boston University is the starting value, but you can choose any institution); then create a comparison group on the bottom chart.  For instance, Michigan State might want to compare itself to Land Grant Universities in the Great Lakes Region.  Three clicks is all it takes.  Highlight the year to, well, highlight a specific year.

Let me know what you think, and, of course feel free to share with others at your institution.  This may answer a lot of "what" questions, and maybe a few "why" questions, but the answers don't always provide insight.

That's what they pay you for.







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Educational Attainment and the Presidential Elections

I've been fascinated for a while by the connection between political leanings and education: The correlation is so strong that I once suggested that perhaps Republicans were so anti-education because, in general, places with a higher percentage of bachelor's degree recipients were more likely to vote for Democrats. The 2024 presidential election puzzled a lot of us in higher education, and perhaps these charts will show you why: We work and probably hang around mostly people with college degrees (or higher).  Our perception is limited. With the 2024 election data just out , I thought I'd take a look at the last three elections and see if the pattern I noticed in 2016 and 2020 held.  Spoiler: It did, mostly. Before you dive into this, a couple of tips: Alaska's data is always reported in a funky way, so just ignore it here.  It's a small state (in population, that is) and it's very red.  It doesn't change the overall trends even if I could figure out how to c...
Post a Comment
Read more

Changes in AP Scores, 2022 to 2024

Used to be, with a little work, you could download very detailed data on AP results from the College Board website: For every state, and for every course, you could see performance by ethnicity.  And, if you wanted to dig really deep, you could break out details by private and public schools, and by grade level.  I used to publish the data every couple of years. Those days are gone.  The transparency The College Board touts as a value seems to have its limits, and I understand this to some extent: Racists loved to twist the data using single-factor analysis, and that's not good for a company who is trying to make business inroads with under-represented communities as they cloak their pursuit of revenue as an altruistic push toward access. They still publish data, but as I wrote about in my last post , it's far less detailed; what's more, what is easily accessible is fairly sterile, and what's more detailed seems to be structured in a way that suggests the company doesn...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Highly Rejective Colleges

If you're not following Akil Bello on Twitter, you should be.  His timeline is filled with great insights about standardized testing, and he takes great effort to point out racism (both subtle and not-so-subtle) in higher education, all while throwing in references to the Knicks and his daughter Enid, making the experience interesting, compelling, and sometimes, fun. Recently, he created the term " highly rejective colleges " as a more apt description for what are otherwise called "highly selective colleges."  As I've said before, a college that admits 15% of applicants really has a rejections office, not an admissions office.  The term appears to have taken off on Twitter, and I hope it will stick. So I took a look at the highly rejectives (really, that's all I'm going to call them from now on) and found some interesting patterns in the data. Take a look:  The 1,132 four-year, private colleges and universities with admissions data in IPEDS are incl...
Post a Comment
Read more