In an admissions landscape defined by sky-high application numbers and single-digit acceptance rates, is it possible to be “too cool for school?” Students who are denied from schools where they feel they should have been accepted sometimes point to yield protection as a rationale. Can you really be rejected for being “overqualified”?
WHAT IS YIELD PROTECTION?
Yield protection is the practice in which academic institutions reject or waitlist a highly qualified student under the assumption that they will be accepted by and enroll at a more prestigious institution. Yield protection is the counterpoint to “tuition discounting,” where institutions actively court top students with incentivizing merit aid.
DOES YIELD PROTECTION OCCUR?
No school has publicly admitted to using yield protection, yet this practice was one of the most talked about trends of the 2022 admission cycle.
When applicants put together strategic, balanced college lists, they should include schools at both ends of their range. However, no school wants to be thought of as a “safety” school. Colleges want to accept students who want to attend their institution and who are likely to enroll. Furthermore, as our recent blog post, “When Your Safeties Are No Longer Safe,” highlights, your safety schools may not be a sure bet in today’s increasingly competitive admissions environment.
There are many anecdotal examples of seemingly highly qualified students being rejected by a less selective college and then gaining admittance to a more competitive one. Similarly, school counselors regularly report cases of a student with lower stats being admitted to a school where a more “impressive” applicant was unsuccessful. It is important to note in these cases that students can be denied for many reasons in the multifactorial admissions process. These accounts are not proof of yield protection.
In some cases, Naviance scattergrams (which track the admissions results from a specific school with respect to GPA and test scores) do indicate that yield protection is occurring. Some counselors report patterns in which admit rates go up as GPA/test score stats increase up to a point – until admit rates decrease at the highest score and grade levels.
MAXIMIZING YIELD VS YIELD PROTECTION
All colleges care about predicting yield accurately to fill, but not overfill, their classes and dorm rooms. Directors of enrollment management use sophisticated models based on historical, financial, and regional trends as well as the college’s track record with specific high schools and a student’s test scores and GPA to predict acceptance rates.
Although neither of the two major college ranking organizations—US News and World Report and Forbes—consider yield as a factor in their rankings, colleges do care about maximizing yield. There are already two commonly recognized and well utilized practices that serve to boost yield significantly:
- Early Decision I and Early Decision II
- Waitlists
Both of these strategies result in close to 100% yield due to the binding nature of the Early Decision rounds. In addition, colleges employ careful waitlist management strategies and ask students about their likelihood of enrolling before being offered a spot.
Yield protection goes a step further than either Early Decision or waitlist strategies to suggest that some colleges care enough about their yield metrics that they are denying admission to their most highly qualified candidates. From those colleges’ perspectives, these top applicants are not a good “fit.”
SCHOOLS THAT IMPLEMENT YIELD PROTECTION
The schools most frequently discussed in reference to yield protection are Tufts, Tulane, University of Chicago, Duke, Emory, Case Western, University of Michigan, UVA, University of Richmond, Lehigh, Boston University, Colgate, Northeastern, Clemson, Auburn, and several of the University of California campuses.
Yield protection has long been associated with Tufts, to the point where it was originally referred to as the “Tufts syndrome.” In recent years, this seems to be even more prevalent at Clemson and Auburn (in 2022, counselors noted unpredictable admissions decisions at both schools). Meanwhile, Tulane doubled-down on its Early Decision strategy this year to the point where it accepted a shocking two-thirds of its class through two rounds of Early Decision – plus more through Early Action – so that it admitted only 106 students through Regular Decision!
While maximizing yield is important to most colleges, yield protection itself (the systematic denying of top applicants) is only regularly happening at a few schools. It poses the most risk for mid-range students who may fall through the cracks at both ends—not competitive enough for the most highly selective schools on their lists while simultaneously being considered too competitive for their target or “likely” schools.
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HOW TO AVOID BEING A CASUALTY OF YIELD PROTECTION
In short, you need to show a high level of interest by:
- Making wise choices in the early application rounds
- Crafting impactful school-specific supplemental essays, and
- Showing “demonstrated interest” via the monitored points of interaction as described in our recent blog post, “Demonstrated Interest at Colleges Where it Really Counts.“
As admissions officers have more students to choose from than ever before, having a wise application strategy, putting together convincing supplemental essays, and doing due diligence with respect to demonstrated interest are critical aspects of putting together a successful college application generally. Happily, these key strategies will also help you avoid the pitfalls of any yield protection practices!
After attending Castilleja School in Palo Alto, California, Heidi graduated cum laude with an Honors thesis from Dartmouth College as a double major in Classical Archaeology and Comparative Literature. At the University of Pennsylvania, Heidi was a Williams Fellow in the graduate program of Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World. She has conducted archaeological field work in Sardinia, Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey.
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One reply on “Yield Protection: The Case of the ‘Overqualified’ Applicant”
“Yield protection” is a shameful practice which only calls attention to a college’s jealousy and inferiority. If a school thinks that only a third of its applicants will enroll, it should simply admit enough of them to pick up the slack. If that occasionally results in a student surplus, it’s far better for the school’s reputation than a deficit which imperils institutional morale and even solvency.
No college can credibly claim to harbor serious academic ambitions while turning up its nose at applicants because they are too accomplished. If it prefers simply to cater to the comfortably unambitious, it should come out and say so. After all, even a President of Princeton once bragged that he ran “the best country club in America.”