Seniors, have you been invited to Admitted Students Days? 

GO! 

Going to admitted students events will give you a better idea of how good a fit the school is for you. Try out the food in the dining hall, check out the dorm you’d be living in, sit in on a class. 

But keep in mind that the college needs to form a solid class. They want to fill seats with the students they admitted. The college is now in SELL mode. You’re the customer. 

Up to this point you were waiting to hear a yes from colleges—now they’re hoping to get a yes from you. Instead of being evaluated, you’re doing the evaluating. 

Mathematical side bar (skip if you don’t like numbers) 

Yield is an important concept here. Yield = students who enroll/students who were admitted. If a high number of admitted students enroll, then the college’s yield is high. For example, if a school gets 2,000 deposits from 5,000 admitted students, their yield is 40 percent. That’s actually pretty good. Stanford, with an admit rate of 4 percent, yields about 82 percent; that is, most students who get in go there. Schools with lower yields have to work harder to earn your deposit. 

Let’s take a fictional college with a yield rate last year of 15 percent. Fun University wants to create a class of 2,000 incoming freshmen, so they need to admit about 13,334 students. If Fun U’s yield goes up this year and more people enroll than expected, they’ve got a housing problem. If yield goes down, they have a budget hole and empty beds. To guard against yield being lower than expected, colleges use waitlists. That way, if more people decline than commit, they have people waiting who will fill out the class. 

Back to the sales job 

Fun U’s Admitted Students Day is a masterclass in yield strategy disguised as a party. The day is packed with choose-your-own-adventure academic sessions, a lazy river lunch, an unscripted one-on-one conversation with a current student in your intended major, and a Saturday night concert capped with fireworks—every moment is designed to make an admitted student feel seen, excited, and already at home. 

Here are a few things to do while you’re there:

1. Talk to current students. Find out what they like about the school, but also what they wish were different.
2. Talk to other admitted students. Where are they from? What’s their intended major? Do they seem like people you would like to learn with?
3. Talk to faculty if you can. These are the folks who will be teaching you. What do they like about the school? What would they change?
4. Take pictures of two places you could study outside of your dorm room. This might even be at a coffee shop off campus.
5. Check out clubs and organizations. They may have tables set up to recruit new members.
6. Read the student newspaper. Find out what these students care about. This is also where you’ll find information about issues on campus that you won’t find in the glossy brochures.
7. Eat! 

Think about Tuesday nights

Enjoy all this, of course. But don’t expect every day to be Admitted Students Day. It’s like marriage. Marriage isn’t just about the honeymoon and vacations in paradise. Marriage is a lot of Tuesday night dinners. Same for college. College isn’t just about Admitted Students Day. College is a lot of Tuesday nights (over 30 of them, in fact). Can you see yourself at this school on those Tuesday nights when you have dinner in the dining hall and you’re studying till midnight? If you can, then this college may be The One.