I know of one student who turned down Williams because of bad weather at Previews (he’s going to Haverford). I don’t know whether the miserable rains are to blame for other students’ decisions. I believe Amherst and Midd had better weather for their accepted student days, which may have helped their yields (but surely not in the case of cross-acceptances with Williams, as those students must have realized that all three schools have similar weather).

I believe that Amherst has done an especially goood job with reaching out to, reassuring, and providing money for its low-income and minority outreach initiative students (Tony Marx’s new showcase initiative) and that a very high percentage of those students accepted their Amherst offers, believing that they would be nurtured at Amherst (probably many more than Tom Parker et al. expected; I suspect that these generally were not cross admits with Williams but I could be wrong).

I have also heard that Amherst has been having better success than it used to with its marketing, emphasizing, for example, its lack of core requirements in a way that appeals to students who are sick of having been pushed into rigid high school curricular requirements.

I just don’t think all that many Williams applicants knew of the Mary Jane Hitler situation, so I’m very skeptical about claims that that influenced their decisions.

Williams seems to have been cautious in its enrollment policy. I’m glad about that after hearing the horror stories of three and sometimes four students being jammed into rooms designed as doubles and of common rooms and lounges being turned into housing at American, Michigan, and other schools in recent years, not to mention first-years at other schools learning in July that they would need to find an apartment to rent (and would probably need a car at college) as their colleges were very short on first-year housing. Yield doesn’t really factor into the quality of the college experience (other than to the extent it involves overenrollment), but a comfortable, vibrant residential college experience is surely one of the glories of a Williams education (notwithstanding continuing problems with the cluster system).

“If, instead, Amherst is just getting more acceptances than it expected from the ‘poor’ students, then that is good news for Williams. Let them have the students we don’t want!”

You just keep outdoing yourself David.

Oh, calm down. Marx’s experiment has been much discussed here, and reasonable people can disagree on its merits. But “we,” as in the Williams Admissions Office, do not in fact want the students in question, just as “we” don’t want most of the students accepted everywhere else in the country. Other colleges are, in fact, encouraged to have them. What’s the problem?

By “poor”, I suspect David may mean “weak students,” not financially distressed students

I suspect the opposite, and I cringed at the same moment Ben did.

No, “poor” clearly refers to the lower socioeconomic quartile candidates Amherst is going after, and that’s fine. David is right, and I’m not cringing — for the moment, Williams doesn’t want these students. I think there’s a good argument that we should, but we currently don’t.

Ben, that is slightly misleading. Williams absolutely wants the lower socioeconomic candidates to enroll, so much so that it undoubtedly takes economic and personal hardship into account, and takes kids with lower SAT’s, etc. than kids from elite private schools. (Just look at the number of kids accepted via Questbridge, or read some of the profiles of who was accepted on college confidential). But this is a group that pretty much every elite college with a lot of resources is extremely committed to enrolling right now, so there is a ton of competition for those kids. Amherst seems to be going one step beyond that — if Marx is true to his word, and Amherst really wants to enroll these types of kids in more than token numbers, it will have to take some chances on kids who are far, far below the numerical norms at Amherst, not just somewhat below. Put it this way — if you think a kid from a rural impoverished area, with 1300 plus SAT’s and solid grades and activities, whose parents who never went to college, isn’t a likely admit at both Williams and Amherst, you’re way off the mark. So Williams aboslutely does “want” poor kids — it wants them more than it wants upper middle class kids, all things being equal. The thing is, to enroll those kids in large numbers, Williams (or Amherst) would likely have to accept a large number of kids with SAT’s closer to the 1100-1250 range. What Williams does not apparently want, at least not as badly as Amherst, is to attract a high percentage of kids from lower socio-economic bands, if doing so would require those kids to have stats far below (as opposed to only moderately below) the average for accepted students.

Absolutely, Jeff, you’re right. My point about Williams is only as compares to Amherst’s new policy. Marx indeed seems to be true to his word, at least for now, and apparently has gone under the usual AR floor to enroll a bunch of incoming freshman that Williams wouldn’t have been interested in.

Middlebury had two preview days: one was the same day as Williams with horrendous weather, the other was much nicer. Overall yield was 47.5% with no perceptual difference for those who visited on the terrible day and those who visited on the nice day. The 47.5% yield was 5-6 percentage points higher than expected.