Every school you apply to reports two very different numbers about how it fills a class. The one everyone fixates on is the acceptance rate -- how many applicants get an offer. The one that actually runs the enrollment office's year is yield rate: of the students who get that offer, how many actually show up. They measure completely different things, and the gap between them is where a real, verifiable surprise sits: Brigham Young University -- a school that accepts roughly 68% of applicants -- enrolls a higher share of its admits than Princeton or Yale, two of the hardest schools in the country to get into.

The pattern, in one chart

The chart above ranks ten schools by yield rate, high to low, using each school's most recently reported figure. MIT leads at 85.0%, followed closely by the University of Chicago (84.8%), Stanford (83.7%), and Harvard (83.0%) -- exactly the outcome you'd expect from the four hardest schools in the country to get into. Then the pattern breaks: BYU, at 79.0%, sits ahead of Princeton (69.2%), Yale (67.9%), Penn (67.9%), Columbia (64.1%), and Duke (55.0%) -- schools that admit somewhere between 4% and 9% of applicants, a tiny fraction of BYU's own admit rate.

That's the whole surprise in one line: BYU converts admitted students into enrolled students at a higher rate than four Ivy League schools, despite being dramatically easier to get into. Selectivity and yield are correlated in general -- harder-to-get-into schools usually do have higher yield, which is exactly why MIT, Chicago, Stanford, and Harvard top this list -- but BYU proves selectivity alone doesn't determine it. See our companion piece on why BYU's yield is so high for the actual mechanism.

So what is a good yield rate for college admissions?

There's no single number -- "good" depends entirely on what kind of school you're comparing against, because yield rate scales heavily with selectivity across the board, not just at the very top. Across every school in the U.S. with published data, the national average yield rate is about 25.7%. Narrow that to the most selective schools (under 15% admit rate), and the average jumps to 55.1%. Narrow it the other direction, to the least selective schools (over 80% admit rate), and the average is actually lower than the overall national figure, at 23.1% -- open-access schools are often a backup option for a large share of the students they admit, not a first choice, so a large share of admits never show up.

That's the real answer to "is X% a good yield rate": compare a school's yield only against schools in its own selectivity tier. A regional public university converting 30% of its admits is doing well for its tier; the same 30% at a top-20 school would be a genuine warning sign for its enrollment office.

Why yield rate matters to you as an applicant, not just to the school

Yield isn't just an internal enrollment-office metric -- it shapes decisions that affect you directly, in ways that are easy to miss if you only think about your own application in isolation:

What this means for you

  • A school's headline acceptance rate tells you nothing about its yield, and vice versa -- they're separate numbers, measuring opposite ends of the admissions funnel, and a school can be unusual on either one independent of the other, exactly like BYU.
  • Judge a yield rate only against schools in the same selectivity tier, not against a flat national number -- the "good yield" bar is dramatically different for a top-20 school than for an open-access one.
  • If you're weighing whether a school is a genuine first choice for most of its admits, yield rate is a more honest signal than acceptance rate -- a school with a high yield is one most admits actually choose, not just one that's hard to get into.

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