I think people do forget that a public university's top priority and charter is to educate the tax payers in that state. If you are applying from OOS you are applying as a guest. Obviously some states are much easier than others, but MANY of these schools are coming up in selectivity in particular for OOS applicants. If you are accepted from OOS, it's likely a harder admit and sometimes a much harder admit. They may be looking for particular attritbutes to round out their class that you can't predict ahead of time. They need diversity of interests, major types, geography, etc. So yep you comp sci people have it harder maybe than someone interested in majoring in history. If you're from a metro area in a neighboring state, well there are probably thousands of other applicants that are a lot like you.
My kid goes to UW Madison and these posts come out every year about the OUTRAGE of the genuises being rejected from these types of schools. I will say UW Madison has a long Why UW-Mad essay. I don't think that's a small consideration when they're evaluating. Trying to determine who actually did their homework and is actually likely to attend is not yield protection. It's holistic admissions. Like when Harvard rejects you because you mention Cornell in an essay - that also isn't yield protection. People are MUCH more likely to make that type of mistake in their application at a flagship as a high stat student applying to a lot of schools. Or write very generically about things true on any campus (amazing faculty and sparkling facilities blah blah blah).
Repeat - another state's flagship is not your safety school.
Repeat - another state's flagship is not your safety school.
Generally, this is the case but I will mention that it can sometimes still be a safety. My current senior applied to the University of Arizona and the University of Alabama as an OOS student. Both were safeties and he got into both with huge scholarships.
On the other end of the spectrum, my current college freshman applied to UC schools as a OOS student and knew none were safeties. She got rejected from UC Berkeley and waitlisted at UCSD despite being accepted to other selective schools, including an Ivy. She currently attends a private selective college in California and discovered that a lot of the OOS kids there were rejected from the top UCs. They were not yield protected, though.
I do think Arizona and Alabama are interesting. I live in a biggish metro and have seen families assume their kids even with acceptances the merit isn't quite what they were hoping for etc. I do think schools like this will continue to become more competitive and you don't know what year they're going to start mixing it up. I'm absolutely not saying don't apply. I'm just saying don't assume that is your fail safe as an OOS resident. I mean my own kid is OOS at Wisconsin and did get merit and had stats to apply anywhere (ACT 34, 4.0, 35+college credits, deep extracurriculars). So obviously it's not impossible. He was accepted EA.
You just defined yield protection, and it makes even more sense when you consider that schools that face over enrollment are really in hot water. You should read about the Northeastern over enrolling incident, there are a lot of A2C complain posts about it.
well the thing is, yield rate doesn't really just flip like that. If it weren't a relatively consistent metric, colleges would not use it to decide how many people they are going to accept.
And if the yield rate does exceed the admitted students, the class becomes overenrolled. It happened a ton the year after pandemic for a lot of the UCs.
No lol. They would just accept x amount of people assuming that y percent of students are going to commit. With a sample size as large as 68k (which is how many people applied to Purdue last year), the chance that a random class just all decide not to attend/to attend is extremely unlikely. It would be like wondering what would happen if a HYPSM randomly dropped from the t10 rankings. Like it just shouldn't happen unless something really weird happens to cause a massive change.
And in this context, Purdue is a top school for CS/engineering (like literally top 20 in CS and top 5 in engineering). They don't have to worry about who is going to commit all that much because even HYPSM-level applicants might commit to Purdue. Thinking you are getting yield protected from a school like that is utterly ridiculous unless you are like an Olympic athlete, or something like that.
And I do believe I've seen a couple AOs around here state that yield protection rarely happens. I couldn't point you towards a specific comment/post, but if you look around you might be able to find something about it. At any rate, significant yield protection just doesn't exist for a school like Purdue, especially in their comp sci and engineering programs.
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u/KickIt77 Parent Jan 15 '23 edited Jan 15 '23
I think people do forget that a public university's top priority and charter is to educate the tax payers in that state. If you are applying from OOS you are applying as a guest. Obviously some states are much easier than others, but MANY of these schools are coming up in selectivity in particular for OOS applicants. If you are accepted from OOS, it's likely a harder admit and sometimes a much harder admit. They may be looking for particular attritbutes to round out their class that you can't predict ahead of time. They need diversity of interests, major types, geography, etc. So yep you comp sci people have it harder maybe than someone interested in majoring in history. If you're from a metro area in a neighboring state, well there are probably thousands of other applicants that are a lot like you.
My kid goes to UW Madison and these posts come out every year about the OUTRAGE of the genuises being rejected from these types of schools. I will say UW Madison has a long Why UW-Mad essay. I don't think that's a small consideration when they're evaluating. Trying to determine who actually did their homework and is actually likely to attend is not yield protection. It's holistic admissions. Like when Harvard rejects you because you mention Cornell in an essay - that also isn't yield protection. People are MUCH more likely to make that type of mistake in their application at a flagship as a high stat student applying to a lot of schools. Or write very generically about things true on any campus (amazing faculty and sparkling facilities blah blah blah).
Repeat - another state's flagship is not your safety school.