The Northeastern Model
According to Northeastern’s website, three items are considered for admissions: grades, test scores, recommendations.
Notably missing: essays.
What does that tell us about the university’s goals? One thing is that Northeastern does not want to introduce bias to its admissions process.
The other is that the admissions process is optimized for one thing: rankings. Essays do not help with that. SAT scores and class rank do.
Does it make sense for the university to strip the life from an application? For Northeastern, it just might.
Unlike elite tier private universities, Northeastern has to deal with a yield in the teens. To fill a class of 2,800, the university has to admit some 15,000 students of a pool of 50,000. Compare that to Stanford which admits only 1,300 from 30,000. An elite tier school gets its pick of the litter. Northeastern has to optimize. When you have to choose 15,000 kids, the essays just do not have that much leverage on an application. Consider that Stanford could admit students 1 to 1300, 1301 to 2600, and 2601 to 3900 and still have a similar class. Northeastern cannot. Students 15,001 to 30,000 are quantifiably much different from the first 15,000.
The process of admitting only the strongest applicants is likely the cause of the university’s low yield. Earlier during class, my friend and I decided to have a look at MIT’s admission decisions page. Of the two pages we looked through, it seemed like the weakest applicants were admitted. Sampling bias? I would believe it. But, every student with perfect test scores and class rank: rejected. The ones who got in were the personable kids. The ones with the charming essays, a story. The ones who, even from their post, seemed to have applied to MIT not as a rite of passage but because they were genuinely passionate about that particular school.
I suspect this has as much to do with yield as character. A class rank one student might not be worth it if they only show up 25% of the time because they applied to fifteen schools. The point is, yield matters more as the strength of the applicant pool becomes more uniform. In the middle of the road, it is not as important. The trade-off between a stronger class and a higher yield is an obvious one.
Another friend pointed out that if every university operated like Northeastern, the world would be a worse place. I wholeheartedly agree. However, I find the approach of optimizing for rankings is ideal for the university at this time. Yes, the whole thing screams “lifeless corporation.” However, the metaphorical wheel needs to start turning. Better students improve rankings; improved rankings attract more better students and faculty; the process is self-reinforcing.
In that sense, the programs that offer students full-scholarship are pretty ingenious on Northeastern’s part. The yield for those offered full-tuition scholarships to the university was in the 90%‘s according to friends familiar with the matter. The program thus secures the top several hundred applicants for the university and simultaneously leaves fewer slots in the entering class to be filled from the rest of the pool, increasing yield and improving the academic profile.
So far the results have been fantastic. The school has gained traction in the US News Rankings. The 25th - 75th percentiles of the SAT range are on par with schools in the top twenty-five, like USC and UC Berkeley, while the Honors Program boasts ranges equitable to Ivy League Universities, with an average SAT score around 1500. Top tier employers hire at Northeastern. And a myriad of new facilities are in development around campus.
Going forward, the challenge for Northeastern to overcome will be its low yield, if it hopes to continue its ascent. The rank by yield actually reads a lot like the US News World Ranking: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Penn, Columbia head the list in that order, a testament to how important the metric is. Although academically strong, Northeastern then can be described as top students’ favorite safety school. If you have good grades and scores, you can get in.
Even as applications continue to increase, the yield remains low: lower than any school in the top 25, at around half of the norm for schools in the second half of the top twenty-five: Vanderbilt, USC.
As a member of the university, I am hopeful that Northeastern is successful in improving its ranking over the coming years. Its educational model is different and makes sense. It exposes students to international opportunities and boasts fantastic resources for developing their careers. It allows them the flexibility to study what they want, to graduate quickly or take their time. To top it off, it has a real campus (with lawns) in the middle of what is arguably the best city in the world to be a student — Boston, Massachussetts. For that, I am confident that students will take notice.
And, maybe one day, Northeastern will move past the Northeastern Model. The admissions page will read that four items are considered from an application: grades, essays, test scores, recommendations.