The Daily reported last week that Stanford’s current yield rate, the percentage of students admitted who will likely attend, is 72 percent. The number may surprise many admission-watchers, since it was above Stanford’s past rates of 70.8 and 69 percent.

For the second consecutive year, it appears Stanford has accepted too many students. Some feel it was done intentionally, “to force the issue” on the proposal to expand Stanford’s class size. “Summer melt,” however, will likely pull the yield rate down to last year’s — Harvard announced it will be pulling 200 or so students from its waitlist and Yale and Princeton each will accept more than 50 students from theirs.

College admission consists of two separate pools of applicants. One group is those students who clearly want to come to Stanford — those students tend to apply early under the “Single-Choice Early Admission” process. The second pool is made up of those students who don’t know where they want to attend and need to be persuaded. It is this group that Admit Weekend sorely under-serves, a topic I’ve discussed previously. It is with this second type of students that Stanford fails to compete with Harvard, Yale and MIT, according to statistics published by the “Revealed Preference Ranking” in December, 2005.

The college admission battlefield has shifted in recent years. Harvard has remained the de facto leader, dropping its early admission program — Princeton followed, though Stanford and Yale did not. Harvard was also the first college to announce a massive new financial aid program for middle-class students — Stanford announced a new, less generous program a few months later. And, overall, according to The New York Times, Harvard is Stanford’s main competitor. On September 16, 2006, the paper reported that 73 percent of students choosing between Harvard and Stanford would choose Harvard.

Stanford’s admission process seems to reveal a dangerous exceptionalism relative to other schools. Rather than competing for students on the same level as our peer schools Harvard, Yale, Princeton and MIT, we assume that students will come here even though other schools offer better financial aid packages and a more comprehensive publicity campaign.

Attracting a diverse student body is important. We shouldn’t only want students who are gung-ho to come here since junior high — students who take a long time to make up their mind are just as valuable. And Stanford misses opportunities to attract students who might not have considered us initially. Unlike all of those other schools, Stanford does not do alumni interviews, thereby missing a crucial opportunity to engage alumni, sell the Stanford experience and put a personal, human face on the admission process. Furthermore, we still engage in early admission despite the inherent unfairness of the process and its abolition by Harvard and Princeton.

What must be questioned is Stanford’s commitment to attracting the very best student. We assume that students will want to come here no matter what. And while many students have wanted to attend Stanford since the day they took that tour sophomore year of high school, many others don’t feel that way, and Stanford isn’t doing enough to compete for those students.

Does competing with the Ivy League for cross-admits even matter? Most professors probably wouldn’t be able to notice a difference if Stanford attracted 20 percent of cross-admits with Harvard or 80 percent. But the fact of the matter is, Stanford should be competing for every student it admits. Why bother to admit students unless we want them to enroll? As of now, we are writing off too many talented students.

Contact Stuart at sbaimel "at" stanford.edu.

ؘ