Re NYTimes: U.C. Irvine Rescinds Acceptances for Hundreds of Applicants

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Geoff Kuenning <geoff () cs hmc edu>
Date: Mon, Jul 31, 2017 at 3:30 AM
Subject: Re: [IP] Re NYTimes: U.C. Irvine Rescinds Acceptances for Hundreds
of Applicants
To: <dave () farber net>


Dave,

What your reader is missing is the way the numbers work.  Waiting
lists are only practical when the number of "declines" is small.

The typical high-status college or university has a (VERY roughly)
30% yield.  In other words, if you accept 10,000 students, you'll
wind up with 3000 who actually enroll.  If your goal is to have
3000 new students this fall and you therefore only accept 3000,
you'll run into two problems: first, many of the remaining 7000
will go away immediately and permanently (since their alternate
choices are often highly desirable), and second, when one of the
3000 turns you down, you lose time reaching out to the waiting
list.  Since everything has to be finished by a deadline (the
first day of classes), you can't afford much time loss.

The other fun thing is "summer melt": people who commit and pay
their deposits, but then don't show up.  That, too, needs to be
accounted for.  My memory is that it runs in the 3-5% range.

So *everybody* plays a statistical game.  The standard approach is
that if you want 3000 students and expect a 30% yield and 5% melt,
you send out about 10,000 acceptances.  If your statistical
predictions are right, you'll wind up with 3000 commitments and
then you can go to the wait list for another 150 to compensate for
the melt.

Every once in a while something happens to screw up the
statistics.  Maybe your school gets some good press in between
when you send out acceptances and when deposits are due.  Or maybe
one of your competitors becomes undesirable.  Or the melt is low.
Sometimes even politics messes up the predictions, as in this year
when the number of overseas students is down for obvious reasons
(although in this year's case, at least the admissions folks knew
about that before they sent acceptances out).

Admissions people don't get gray hairs worrying about whether
they've accepted a bad student or rejected a future Nobel Prize
winner.  Their real stress is almost entirely about yield and
melt.

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> > From: "Synthesis:Law and Technology"
> > <synthesis.law.and.technology () gmail com>
> > Date: July 30, 2017 at 5:15:39 PM EDT
> > To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
> > Subject: Re: [IP] NYTimes: U.C. Irvine Rescinds Acceptances for
> > Hundreds of Applicants
> >
> > Dave,
> >
> > I must be missing something here.  The stated reason is too
> > many
> > people accepted the offers. So why offer too many? What's wrong
> > with
> > waiting lists?  What criteria were used, I refuse to believe
> > that
> > all successful applicants exactly made it to the same degree.
> > Waiting lists for acceptance have been around
> > since...well... before
> > my time at least.  I was on the wait list for my chosen med
> > school
> > but law was most excited to have me.  By the time med school
> > recognized my inherent " superiority" and offered me a place, I
> > was
> > already reading up for first term.  I can guarantee they found
> > someone further on the list to replace.  And this was all done
> > without massive computer systems. Someone accepts an offer?
> > "Boop"
> > someone at the end is no longer on the wait list.  Or left
> > there
> > just in case.  It's really trivial at that point.  And
> > scalable.
> > You do a manual override to accept more than the quota for
> > history?
> > The overall number gets decreased in the faculty.  There just
> > seems
> > no need for this.

--
    Geoff Kuenning   geoff () cs hmc edu
    http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~geoff/

McDonald's, which does not wait on your table, does not cook your
food
to order, and does not clear your table, came up with the slogan
``We
Do It All For You.''
        -- Dave Barry



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