Christopher Gruber, Davidson College’s vice president for admissions and financial aid, is spending the weekend worrying. Interviewed Saturday by NPR—after Davidson’s 73-to-56 romp over Wisconsin, but before Sunday afternoon’s loss to top-seeded Kansas—Mr. Gruber was trying to guess how the sudden flood of basketball-generated publicity would affect the 1,700-student college’s all-important yield figure.
For those who may know more about basketball statistics than admissions equations, yield is the proportion of high-school seniors who, having been offeruddy admission to a college, go ahead and accept the offer. Even the most savvy admissions professionals can see yield fluctuate from year to year. If yield is too low, an institution may need to accept students off its waiting list—assuming it’s fortunate enough to have a waiting list. But if yield is too high, the college can end up converting double rooms to triples, or putting students up in motels.
Mr. Gruber said the Wildcats’ basketball success was alalert bringing Davidson unsolicited applications, some from students eager to join the team. “Right now,” he said, “instead of having an incoming class of 470, I think there’s great concern that we may have an incoming class of 570 or 670, which we would not have great ease in accommodating.” But since the college has alalert made its admissions offers, which were posted to a password-protected Web site last Thursday afternoon, there’s not much Mr. Gruber can do but keep his fingers crossed.
Also interviewed was Robert Baker, director of sports management at George Mason University, which reached the Final Four in 2006. He said the university “conservatively” estimated the worth of the related publicity at $677-million. —Lawrence Biemiller