Yes Colleges Reject Overqualified Students, this is a common practice at NEAR IVY private and public universities in order to safeguard their YIELD. Yield is the percentage of admitted students that enroll in college. Most prestigious universities are fully aware that they have known their applications and matriculation class profile for the previous 10 or 20 years. They know who will most likely come if admitted and who will not.
If a very smart applicant who is applying to all IVYs applies to Tufts, Notre Dame, Emory, Georgetown, UVA, and Michigan as safeties, they have a high chance of getting into an IVY but will be rejected by some of the safety schools because those schools know that if they have all the checkboxes marked off to go to an IVY/Stanford/UChicago, they will not go to Tufts or Emory.
If all institutions admit all highly eligible individuals, all yields fall because top applicants receive ZERO rejections from the 20 schools to which they apply but only attend one (19 competing colleges lose yield value). And no college wants a low yield. As a result, it is in their best advantage to reject many of the candidates in order to keep their acceptance rate as LOW AS POSSIBLE in order to maintain their prestige factor while also PROTECTING their YIELD.
Why should COLBY’s admission rate be 9% vs 20%, which is lower than Cornell, USC, and Berkeley? Is Colby really that good? In my opinion, no. However, it is highly connected to all of the East Coast’s Elite Private Prep Schools and one of the several Safety schools for top candidates. Colby understands that many Prep School students will check off Colby as a safety net and not go because they want to attend an Ivy or, at the very least, a Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, or Bowdoin. They have no trouble rejecting 91% of their candidates since it maintains a high level of status. In comparison, the class of 2005 at Colby had a 33% admit rate.
Watch roughly 20 random college acceptance videos from top kids who get into Stanford and top Ivys if you need proof of this occurrence. Many of them get rejected from Tufts and other nearby Ivys and top liberal arts universities because those institutions recognise that they are only safety schools for them.
Yield Protection/Tufts Syndrome: What Is It?
The relationship between a student and a college is reciprocal during the college admission process. Applicants work hard to distinguish themselves to universities, while institutions work hard to attract potential students. In today’s competitive application climate, when students apply to several institutions, one of the qualities many universities look for in candidates is a willingness to attend—that is, would a student really enroll if accepted? Colleges use the yield, often known as acceptance rates, to calculate this.
Yield Understanding
To comprehend yield protection, you must first comprehend what yield is. The yield is simply the percentage of accepted students who enroll in a university. Many universities believe that their output reflects their prominence. Harvard University had a yield of 81.7% for its class of 2022, while Tufts had a yield of 46.5% for its 2020 class. Highly selective institutions typically have larger yields than less selective schools, owing to the fact that they are frequently a student’s first choice.
Yield Protection Explained
Yield protection is a strategy purportedly employed by some schools and universities in which great prospects are rejected or waitlisted, in part because the kids are expected to be approved and matriculate at more prestigious institutions. Because many institutions feel that yield is a sign of a school’s popularity, they strive to boost yield; no school wants to be known as a “safety” school. Yield protection is sometimes known as “Tufts syndrome,” from the number of times Tufts University has been accused of the practice.
One of the most heated disagreements about yield protection is whether it exists at all—no institution officially confesses to it, and some believe that Tufts syndrome is a fiction made up by students upset over being waitlisted or denied by a school they thought they’d be accepted to. How much a college regards proven interest is a revealing attribute of schools that indicates if a college’s procedures produce protection. Schools that place a high importance on expressed interest provide a remedy to any possible Tufts Syndrome; simply display true excitement about the institution.