“Prestige is to higher education as profit is to corporations,” wrote the late Doug Toma in 2011.
Toma was professor of higher education at the University of Georgia and a friend. He was fascinated by how colleges and universities are always jockeying for position in the pecking order of higher education. On visits to Athens, we would talk for hours over beers about how universities used athletics to shape their brand.
The levers colleges and universities have to raise their prestige are limited—at least without tens of billions of dollars at their disposal. Unlike in the corporate world where a company’s prominence is evaluated in direct proportion to its earnings or stock price, colleges have no such clear standards.
The one lever many campuses try to pull is to make themselves more selective.
But they don’t control every number in the admissions equation. Sure, colleges can encourage more applications while holding the size of their incoming class constant, but one thing they don’t control is yield (the number of students who accept their offer of admission). The lower a university’s yield, the more students they have to accept in order to reach their target class, thus look less selective.
That is why a rising number of applications isn’t a good measure of popularity because for many students that might be their second-, third-, or fourth-choice college. That was the case at Tulane University in the middle of last decade: its yield rate was lagging behind competitors because it was a back-up choice for too many accepted students who ended up going elsewhere.
As I explain in my book, Who Gets In and Why, Tulane started to offer early decision, along with a more flexible early action program in 2016, to help boost yield by forcing a portion of accepted students to make a binding commitment.
Early decision is a tool that has increasingly been used by colleges since the Great Recession as a way to quickly improve both yield and selectivity.
Because campuses blend their acceptance and yield rates from all their admissions cycles, if a school accepts and automatically enrolls a substantial proportion of their class in the early rounds, yield is essentially 100%. Selectivity climbs as well because the remaining applicants for regular decision—always a larger pool compared to early decision—are fighting for the few spots left in the class.
I’ve always wondered when early decision would essentially become regular decision because the balance of acceptances started to lean on the early side.
The scales have certainly tipped in recent years. Barnard, for instance, finalized 62% of the seats in this fall’s freshman class before it even considered regular-decision applications. Boston University filled about 50% of its class early; a decade ago, it enrolled just 13% of the class early. The University of Pennsylvania filled 51% of its class early this year.
But as Inside Higher Ed reported recently, Tulane takes the prize: it enrolled two-thirds of students through one of two early decision rounds and another 25% through early action. So only 106 students were enrolled from the regular decision pool—out of a first-year applicant pool of more than 40,000 teenagers.
There’s nothing wrong with what Tulane did. It’s responding to an admissions market where teenagers and their parents don’t think they’ll get in anywhere (even though they will), and as a result, apply early to have a decision in hand in December from some school that ranks “high enough.”
The problem is that early decision is binding for families. Well, maybe it is.
One of the more interesting responses to the Inside Higher Ed article came from Jon Boeckenstedt's Twitter feed. Boeckenstedt is vice provost for enrollment management at Oregon State and digs into admissions numbers in his blog, Higher Ed Data Stories. He pointed out several inconsistencies with Tulane’s numbers in the article, but I found this one most illuminating: Tulane admitted 2,129 early-decision students, according to Jon’s calculations, but only enrolled around 1,200 of them.
Why is that so interesting? In admissions-land ED is considered “binding,” but the dirty little secret is that every year more and more students are getting out of the agreements. And it seems at Tulane, more than 900 of them did. (I asked Tulane for clarification, but didn’t hear back yet).
Perhaps students severed their ED agreements at Tulane after they got in somewhere else. Even so, early decision has achieved what Tulane’s leaders wanted: the university has increased its yield from 23% in 2016 to nearly 46% last fall.
In the end, yield is only a number. Maybe it’s a symbol of prestige. In an industry obsessed with measurement, it certainly is a measure. But it’s also critical to remember: not everything important is measurable, and not everything measurable is important.
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