How Colleges are Like the Airlines

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? There are just three days left to pre-order my new book, Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions. Here's how Frank Bruni described the book in his column in last Sunday's New York Times:

Selingo was given extraordinary access to the selection process and the selectors at Emory University, Davidson College and the University of Washington. He uses it in his book to present one of the most nuanced, coolheaded examinations of the admission process that I’ve read. 

The good news is that after Tuesday, I won't be pushing pre-orders in this newsletter. The bad news is that after Tuesday you won't have access to these bonus goodies: an exclusive webinar on applying to college in the middle of a pandemic, an email class on the college search, and a signed and numbered book plate.

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• Oh, and one final thing on this: tell your friends, your family, your high-school counselor about this pre-order offer. It's open to anyone until Tuesday.

?? ??When you hear the term “yield management,” you probably think of airlines or hotels. Both sectors constantly look at their numbers to figure out what levers they can pull on a particular day to fill more seats or rooms.

You probably don’t think colleges are in the yield management business. But they are.

Two weekends ago, the Wall Street Journal ran an essay based on an excerpt from my book.  The essay focused on the “shaping” process, a moment near the very end of selecting a class when admissions offices put a finer line on the contours of their next class.

For colleges, the act of sending out acceptance notices each spring isn’t how they ultimately judge their own success—enrollment is, the number of students who actually show up on campus.

• One early—and often accurate—measure of enrollment is yield.
• Yield is the percentage of students who say Yes to a college’s acceptance. In many ways, colleges use it as a mark of their popularity. The thinking in admissions goes that the higher the yield rate, the more popular the school. After all, students can apply to multiple schools, but they can only attend one (here’s a somewhat dated, but nifty game about which colleges students choose when accepted to more than one).

By the numbers: Overall, the yield rate has dropped significantly in the last two decades at most four-year colleges, from 41 percent in 2001 to 26 percent in 2018, as application volume increased.

• But the overall yield number masks significant differences by type of institution based on selectivity. Simply put, the more selective a college, the more likely an accepted student is to say Yes.
• The median yield for “Ivy plus” universities (the Ivy League, Duke, MIT, Stanford and the University of Chicago) is 68%.
• Then there’s a big dropoff for everyone else: other elite privates and publics, 37%; highly selective private colleges, 22%; less selective private schools, 14%.
• Here’s a visualization of yield rates my colleague, Scott Smallwood, co-founder of Open Campus, put together.

Why it matters: Like airlines who oversell seats (well, at least in the pre-pandemic days), colleges know some students—or in reality, many students—won’t take them up on their acceptance offer. Despite sophisticated modeling, colleges might know how many students won’t say Yes, but they don’t always know exactly which students will turn them down.

• Schools are not choosing a class as much as they are sending out invitations to join a class.
• In the final weeks before those invitations are sent, selective colleges finalize the list in a process called “shaping.” Think of it as finalizing the invite list for a wedding. Guests are moved on and off the list based on whether you think they’ll show up or the groom’s family has too many invites compared to the bride’s.
• Admissions officers ask questions about their invite lists, too. Do we have enough students who can pay the bulk of the tuition bill? Too many women in the class? Too many students from the Southwest or Northeast? Enough humanities majors?

Between the lines: Demonstrated interest is one way colleges try to predict yield. The term is jargon for an important metric to colleges, basically the willingness of the applicant to actually enroll.

• About one in five schools say demonstrated interest is of “considerable importance” in their admissions decisions, according to an annual survey by the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
• That’s about the same weight they give to counselor recommendations and essays, and even more consideration than given to teacher recommendations, class rank, and extracurricular activities.
• Schools measure demonstrated interest in a variety of ways: How many of their emails did you open and how quickly? Do you follow them on social media? Did you show up when an admissions representative visited your high school? Have you taken a campus tour? Or they ask a supplemental question on the Common Application about why you want to attend the school.
• With so many of those measures off the table, at least temporarily because of the pandemic, determining demonstrated interest this admissions cycle is going to be difficult for many schools. 

Of note: Demonstrated interest is one method for controlling the yield number; so too is early admissions. Here’s a passage from the book to explain:  

Before the Common App and filing applications online really took off, applicant pools were still relatively modest compared to today’s numbers. Say a college received 12,000 applications a year and needed an incoming class with 2,000 students. A yield rate around the typical 33 percent would require the school to send out acceptances to 6,000 students. That gave the college an acceptance rate of 50 percent, which at the time was okay.

Adding early decision could quickly improve both yield and selectivity in the eyes of the public. That’s because schools blend their rates from all their admissions cycles. So say a school received the same number of overall applications, but accepted and automatically enrolled 500 out of 1,000 applicants in ED and the remaining 1,500 through the regular decision.

Now yield suddenly increases because one-fourth of the class promised to come if they were enrolled, and selectivity climbs as well because the remaining 11,000 applicants—remember, the same applicants that were there without ED—are now fighting for fewer spots. That’s one way some schools, including Penn, Vanderbilt, and Northwestern, steadily moved up the college rankings beginning in the late 1990s

The big picture: Just as yield management in the airline and hotel business is reliant on historical data, so too is predicting yield in admissions.

• But how students and families will approach the college search in a pandemic is a big unknown this year. Past performance won’t be an indicator of future results. Many colleges will be flying blind.
• So expect them to press harder on early admissions to shore up their class and search for other ways to measure demonstrated interest.
• Read more: A sample from Chapter 4, exclusive for subscribers of this newsletter, about how one university used early admissions to improve its yield rate.

As always, thanks for subscribing.

Cheers — Jeff

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