The enrollment rate for a given college depends on many factors such as:
- Desirability of the college
- Public or Private college
- Main campus or the satellite campus in a public university system
- College with a specific philosophy or affiliation
- Generosity of Financial Aid Offers including Merit Aid
- Recruitment of International Students
- Tiers in Application Submission: Early Action/Regular Decision/Priority Deadline for Scholarships
Enrollment rate needs to be evaluated in conjunction with the admission rate and some of the above factors. Since colleges only report the total annual enrollment rate, it can be hard to understand the role each factor plays into the determination of the enrollment rate. However there are some empirical observations that may help you as you look at the enrollment rate.
Generally, low admission rates and high enrollment rates go hand in hand. No college boasts of 100% enrollment rate: Harvard and Stanford have an enrollment rate of around 80% which is the highest of any university. Even places like Cornell and Dartmouth, both Ivies, have enrollment rates of the order of around 50%. A 50% enrollment rate means that only half of the accepted students finally enroll at a college. The reason for this is because students apply to more than one college, and at the end of the day, they can only attend one college!
Achieving a sustainable and a reasonable enrollment rate is an optimization problem for the colleges. Hence colleges offer admission to many more students than they can enroll and they also maintain waitlists. After all, they need to have a full class in the fall and plan for that! This is a reason why colleges love Early Decision (ED) and Early Action (EA) programs and usually offer admission to a higher percentage of ED/EA applicants as opposed to regular decision (RD) applicants. An oft asked question is: Does the enrollment rate correlate with the waitlist and the chances of getting an offer off the waitlist? Unfortunately, there is no direct correlation between the enrollment rates and the known wait-listed offers of admission. As we told you above, both Cornell and Dartmouth have 50% enrollment rates. Last year, Dartmouth offered admission to 129 waitlist students out of a pool of 963 students (data from College Board) whereas Cornell offered admission to 81 waitlisted students out of a pool of 2231 students (data from College Board). While enrollment rate can give a sense of a chance of getting off the waitlist, it has to be approached with caution. It can be used to an extent, when you are comparing a similar set of colleges — within the Ivies, or liberal arts colleges, or the bigger state universities.
Another place where enrollment rate can offer insight is when you see a low number, such as less than 20%. If you have such a college in your list, it is worth taking a second look and trying to understand the possible reasons for the low number. Low enrollment rates are not necessarily red flags, nor does it mean that the college is not a good choice. It just means that it warrants a second look at the cost of attending that college, the amount of financial aid available, the different services available, the educational opportunities, the internship and career placement opportunities etc. For example, UC Riverside has an enrollment rate of 19% and yet there are no obvious red flags about the education, financial aid or career placement. It is just a case of students applying to multiple UC campuses and then accepting their favorite offer of admission. However, if you are looking to pay nearly $60,000/year for college with a low enrollment rate, then it might make sense to look around for other options, unless there is significant merit aid involved or something else that can help mitigate the low enrollment rate statistic for you.
In today’s world, the enrollment rate is also dependent on the merit aid offering. Colleges with large merit aid offering have seen their enrollment rates climb since the 2008 crash. Merit aid is a big topic that we’ll visit in a future post, as many colleges are now offering merit aid. Only colleges with a historically reasonable and sustainable enrollment rates do not feel compelled to offer merit aid, as they are considered to be very “desirable” colleges by students and parents. Colleges with a particular philosophy or religious affiliation or state universities with large distributed/satellite campuses can have fairly high enrollment rates. Again, we’ll do another post on them.
To conclude, enrollment rate is an important metric, perhaps more for colleges than students and parents. Yet you can use it to make decisions about comparing a set of colleges on your application list, accepting an offer of admission, rejecting an offer of admission, shopping for aid, and even staying on the waitlist.