Parties That Sell Colleges
A pair of vivacious Dartmouth grads sidle up to a high school senior at a Glendale party, less interested in the teenager’s budding sideburns than his 4.0 GPA. One of the women promises fun on the slopes, the other a diploma with “snob appeal.”
It’s a seduction, to be sure, but for their alma mater, the Big Green.
Down the hill in Pasadena, the stunning and clean-cut USC “pepsters” are doing much the same, but with a harder sell, enticing a group of San Gabriel Valley high schoolers with suggestions of better jobs--and maybe even romance--if they join “the Trojan family.”
And behind the gates of Rolling Hills, a Princeton alum wearing an orange tiger tail tries to captivate brainy high school girls with an intellectual success story: how one Princeton student parlayed his senior thesis into a National Book Award-winning biography.
They are called “yield parties” and they pop up like crocuses this time of year, each designed to “close the deal” with college-bound students before they commit to another school.
The name comes from the measure that helps show where each college and university stands in the higher education pecking order--the percentage, or “yield,” of students admitted to the school who actually enroll in the fall.
“It’s like a batting average for an admissions director,” said Mel Elfin, who edits U.S. News and World Report’s college guides. “Admissions directors were getting fired when their admissions and yields were down.”
And today is the critical day for most colleges and universities anxious to learn how well they’ve done--it’s deadline day for the high schoolers to declare where they’ll spend the next four years.
Of course, experienced admissions officials have learned plenty of other ways to court the students they have accepted, from the old-fashioned direct-mail method--meaning slick brochures and course catalogs--to videotapes and CD-ROMS, such as one from the Illinois Institute of Technology that gives prospects a “virtual tour” of the campus. Others, such as Wesleyan in Connecticut, establish “chat rooms” on the Internet for new admits. A password accompanies the acceptance letter.
Others invite the lucky high schoolers to campus open houses shortly before decision day, have faculty flatter them with phone calls or even bash each other, however gently.
When a blizzard buried New England in April, Pomona College’s admissions officers--who often compete with schools in that region--sent East Coast applicants a weather bulletin from California: “Hi 70 Lo 60 Sunny (Typical winter weather) We are thinking of you! Wish you were here!”
But no technique is more personal than unleashing a school’s most loyal supporters--its alumni--to open their homes to the local students who may someday join their ranks.
“Some alumni get fired up about the place all over again when they start subtly, and not always so subtly, to do the sales pitch,” said Bruce Poch, Pomona’s dean of admissions. “Their enthusiasm can be contagious.”
The most avid yield partyers are the Ivy League and other elite private colleges and universities. Though the gatherings are staged across the nation this time of year, Southern California is seen as an especially fertile hunting ground for top high school talent--particularly minority students.
Little-Known Step in Admissions Process
The invitation-only events, however, may be the least known step in the years-long college recruitment and admissions process. Indeed, Harvard folk refused to let a reporter infiltrate theirs on a recent Sunday at the home of a Pasadena attorney. They said they wanted to keep the party low-key for the sake of the fragile, anxious students.
The same day, though, USC and Dartmouth alumni readily allowed an outsider into their afternoon parties nearby. USC’s guests of honor in Pasadena were several dozen admitted students from the San Gabriel Valley, predominantly Asian Americans interested in majoring in business.
Students and their parents sipped soft drinks, munched cookies and milled about next to the pool and guest house of a New Orleans Colonial mansion where brick-lined walkways wander through the meticulous lawns, shrubs and trees--landscaping worthy of Huntington Botanical Gardens, a few blocks away. They finally gathered around a cabana to hear USC admissions Dean Joe Allen, alumni and students give testimonials to the value of joining the Trojan family.
“I’m now working at Disney, thanks to USC,” beamed Jessica del Mundo, a graduating senior who introduced herself and the boyfriend she met at USC. “So there are lots of benefits--I’m getting my B.A. and maybe my M.R.S.”
Del Mundo was one of the attractive “pepsters”--the women in dresses and the men in khakis and USC ties--roaming about to lavish attention on the prospects.
Said one high school counselor and yield party veteran: “These deans of admissions are very smart about how to market to 17-year-olds.”
USC holds such events throughout California and two dozen locations elsewhere, covering every major city on the Eastern seaboard. So do Stanford, Pomona and many other private colleges and universities.
The process of getting students to the affairs starts almost the moment they are accepted by a school. The lucky seniors are likely to get a letter or phone call from a local alumnus congratulating them and inviting them to a yield party--though that name would never be used.
Don Nakanishi, a Yale alum and UCLA professor, goes further. He sets up a 24-hour hotline in his home to field questions about Yale and sends admitted students a long letter with tips on dealing with homesickness, bracing for a Connecticut winter and living down the stereotype of Californians as “laid-back surfers and freaks.”
Many of the students who show up at the parties don’t need convincing--they’ve already agreed to attend the host school. For them, the parties provide a chance to meet other members of the class of 2001, sowing seeds of friendships that will flourish in the fall. “We joke about how many first dates result from these things,” said Poch, Pomona’s admissions dean.
Audrey Li of Irvine said the classmates she encountered at Yale’s reception at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana served “to affirm” her decision to spurn offers from Swarthmore and Berkeley.
Chatting with local alumni also gives some comfort to parents worried their sons or daughters will go far away to college and never come back.
The parents of Lorraine Palacios decided it was OK for her to leave town for college--becoming the first in her family to do so--after Stanford alums threw a yield party in her hometown of El Paso. Her parents, she said, were “in awe” of the doctors, lawyers and other prominent El Paso residents who were graduates of the school.
“We got to see how they did it and ask questions,” she said.
The parties vary widely. Some become freewheeling schmooze-fests, others formal Q&A; sessions.
Some are intimate affairs, like Dartmouth’s party, which drew three dozen people--a pretty even mix of prospects, their parents and alumni--to a home high in the Glendale hills with a spectacular view of the Los Angeles Basin. The hosts showed two videos of the campus, with ample footage of student athletes in shorts running on lush lawns. But the alumni can’t avoid questions about the long, frigid New Hampshire winters.
Stanford’s party was much bigger, filling both reception halls at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles with 350 high school students, parents and alumni.
Party planners often fret over every detail, from where to hold it to which alumni to invite.
Picking the site is a balancing act: The alumni want to impress the teenagers and their parents with a nice venue, but worry that too fancy an address could intimidate some. “We have that debate every year,” said Howard Fredman, the Princeton alum with the school mascot’s orange and black striped tail pinned to his backside.
The Princeton organizers settled on a doctor’s house in the pricey, gated community of Rolling Hills. The view stretched from the Pacific Palisades coastline to Santa Catalina Island.
As for whom to invite, younger alums are considered better candidates to connect with the teenagers. At least they won’t be describing the student union as it was during the Hoover administration.
The Princeton party organizers also hoped for a repeat performance from their “secret weapon,” A. Scott Berg, who turned his thesis into the biography “Max Perkins, Editor of Genius,” which won the 1980 National Book Award.
Berg canceled at the last minute, however, so his college chums did their best to recount why he picked Princeton over Williams, but they failed to mention how a graduate of that school turned his senior project into a book on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s relationship with Joseph Kennedy.
Aiming for a Wide Variety of Role Models
Alumni organizers also take pains these days to provide a diverse group of role models, not just the Old School types in matching college blazers and straw hats.
An awful lot of youths, particularly minorities, are scared of going off to places that are “very white, very rich and very male,” noted one of the Princeton organizers, Marshall Long.
A variant of the alumni-hosted yield party is the campus open house.
Stanford’s open house lasted three days earlier this month. Berkeley had Cal Day, staging events to satisfy every taste--from faculty poetry readings to ROTC students rappelling off Wheeler Hall.
UCLA had one too and, not to be outdone, USC helped pay the air fare of 200 high schoolers who attended its open house.
The practice of flying in students is particularly popular among private universities that want to attract more Latino and African American students.
Among those enjoying an all-expense-paid three-day trip to Pomona College last week was Trina Jenkins of Chicago, a veteran of such royal treatment. She had just completed junkets to Rice University in Texas, Vanderbilt in Tennessee and Davidson College in North Carolina.
Fuerza Linda Fraga of Waco, Texas, had two sponsors of her California trip. Stanford paid her way from Texas to Palo Alto. She went from there to Pomona College, which flew her back home. The two schools split her air fare between Northern and Southern California.
Jenkins and Fraga--who were holding on to their options--joined dozens of other Pomona prospects enjoying campus receptions, attending classes, eating in the student dining hall and sleeping on mattresses in dorm rooms.
“I’ve heard about athletes getting this kind of treatment,” Fraga said. “It’s nice they are doing this for the smart kids as well.”
Filling a freshman class can be tricky business. Just as commercial airlines overbook their flights, colleges must extend offers to many more students than will actually enroll.
Harvard has perhaps the easiest job because three out of four admitted students accept its offer. For other schools, 50% is an extraordinary yield, requiring only that they double-book each slot. Many schools have to triple book because their yields dip to 33% or less.
Admissions officials in the Los Angeles area gripe that their batting average can suffer from events way beyond their control, such as riots and earthquakes, which have a way of scaring off out-of-town prospects.
There’s more than pride at stake if the yield fluctuates dramatically.
Wind up with too few students? The college loses money by being underenrolled. Too many? It runs out of beds in the dorm and seats in the classroom.
“It’s a very precarious situation,” said Mark Hatch, a former assistant dean of admissions for Bates College. “If either happens, deans can lose their jobs.”
When Hatch was a graduate student at Harvard, he studied the effectiveness of yield parties for its admissions office. The question: Do they win converts, or just preach to the converted?
His findings remain confidential, but he noted that most of the students Harvard accepts also get in to many other schools--and will at least attend the rival yield parties, leaving Crimson alumni little choice but to hold their own.
“There is a fear factor,” Hatch said. “If [the alums] don’t, and another [school] throws a great party, they may lose a handful of kids.”
Times staff writer Davan Maharaj contributed to this article.
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Shopping for a College
Over the past two decades, it has become much more common for high school students to apply to three or more colleges. As a result, the top achievers can end up with a fistful of acceptance letters, allowing them to be choosy--and spurring competition among those colleges to win their “yes.” The figures below show the percentage of college freshman who reported applying to three or more colleges and universities:
‘76: 36.7%
‘77: 41.5%
‘78: 44.8%
‘79: 42.7%
‘80: 43.3%
‘81: 44.1%
‘82: 44.7%
‘83: 44.6%
‘84: 47.2%
‘85: 45.4%
‘86: 47.5%
‘87: 48.9%
‘88: 53.7%
‘89: 53.5%
‘90: 52.6%
‘91: 47.6%
‘92: 49.3%
‘93: 53.7%
‘94: 52.6%
‘95: 51.5%
‘96: 52.1%
Source: Higher Education Research Institute, UCLA
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STUDENT HARVEST
Colleges and universities pay careful attention to their “yield,” the percentage of students admitted who enroll in the fall, spurning other schools. Here are 1996 yields for some institutions listed near the top of U.S. News and World Report’s yearly rankings of colleges:
Harvard: 75%
Princeton: 60%
Stanford: 55%
MIT: 53%
Yale: 54%
Brown: 48%
Dartmouth: 46%
Wellesley: 44%
Amherst: 43%
Caltech: 43%
Claremont McKenna: 41%
Duke: 40%
Williams: 40%
Pomona College: 32%
Vanderbilt: 30%
