How to sweet-talk a college

Colleges care a lot about yield, or the share of admitted students who enroll. If they let a kid in, they really want him or her to show up in the fall. Your family can exploit that concern.

Here’s some evidence

EAB is a company that does data analysis for colleges trying to optimize admissions and enrollment.

Colleges pay EAB and its competitors a lot of money to help them decide whom to let in. Here’s what EAB’s advertising materials say about yield:

“The post-admit phase is widely recognized by enrollment teams as the highest-stakes part of the recruitment funnel. More so than any other stage of a student’s journey to matriculation, this is where missteps on your part are likely to have the biggest repercussions for your downstream enrollment outcomes.

This resource center brings together in one place a variety of EAB resources, including white papers, toolkits, and blog posts, offering practical advice on how you can ensure that the largest possible number of your admitted students are depositing and enrolling.”

This study from Brookings has some more detail about how colleges and the companies they hire, like EAB, do this:

“The predictive step of algorithmic enrollment is aimed at estimating how likely an accepted applicant is to enroll in a specific college. To do this, a college will first consolidate data about a college’s past applicants, including variables like their high school GPA, standardized tests scores, FAFSA data, how much financial aid they received, where they live, and demographic information. Colleges also frequently incorporate engagement metrics, such as how often applicants attend college recruitment events and what percentage of college emails they read. Using this historical admissions data, the college or a vendor will then build a predictive model with these variables to predict whether each of the accepted applicants chose to enroll.”

You know I have to include what the Harvard litigation turned up on the topic. Internal documents, trial testimony, and deposition testimony show that Harvard tracks yield in minute detail: for early vs. regular decision, by ethnicity, by intended major, and by region of the country.

I’m not going to link to those internal Harvard documents because they were quite tricky to find online. I don’t think the person who posted them was supposed to, and I don’t want to get that person in trouble. If you’d like to learn more insights from them, you can book a one-on-one session with me here.

Back to yield.

Why do colleges care so much?

First, because it’s easier for them to plan if they have a decent idea of how many kids they will have to house, feed, and teach come September.

Here’s an example of how things get uncomfortable when colleges guess incorrectly. UNC Charlotte needs to find housing for almost 500 students. Here’s what incoming students heard:

“As a result of the high demand and a lack of cancellations that we typically see by this point in the summer, we anticipate that we will not be able to assign you to a space prior to the start of fall semester.”

Not reassuring!

Colleges also care because yield is a marker of prestige. Why else would Harvard care so much? In fact, Harvard reinstated early action in 2011 because its yield stats were slipping. Here’s a snippet from another internal Harvard document, turned up in the Students for Fair Admissions lawsuit.

“The decline in yield among the most desirable students […] led us to the conclusion that Harvard should reintroduce early action.”

The same point, from a Harvard admissions officer, testifying under oath:

“Q: Harvard reinstated early admissions because it was concerned that its yield rate, those accepting their offer of admission, had declined. True or not true?

A: True.”

There is one more reason colleges care about yield. Higher yield figures save colleges money by lowering their cost of capital. The higher the yield, the more creditworthy the rating agencies think a college is.

Here’s a comment from the former dean of admissions from Pomona College:

“I remember sitting down with bond raters from Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s and them asking, ‘How many applications do you get and what is your yield?’ The more demand, the higher our bond rating, and the lower our interest rates. So a higher yield meant saving millions of dollars a year in interest payments.”

What does it mean for your kid?

You may have heard the term “demonstrated interest.” Colleges’ concern about yield is why we do that.

We demonstrate interest in the college, so the admission office thinks, “this kid likes us! If we let her in, she’s likely to enroll, which will boost our prestige, increase our creditworthiness, and improve our ability to allocate housing.”

How to demonstrate interest?

Let’s go back to that Brookings study.

“Colleges also frequently incorporate engagement metrics, such as how often applicants attend college recruitment events and what percentage of college emails they read.”

So, your child should always register for everything. Info sessions, campus visits, college fairs. He should write his name and email down every time, without fail. It’s also good to click through from promotional emails.

For some less obvious options, I recommend you download my free checklist of admission tasks. If you stick to that list and timeline, you can know that you’ve sent reassuring signals about your interest early and often.

Another crucial opportunity to demonstrate interest is the “why us?” essay. I have read some pretty half-baked “why us?” essays, clearly written as an afterthought. They make me cringe. Why waste this golden chance to demonstrate interest?

To figure out how to make the most of them, you can register for a one-on-one session here. I look forward to working with you!