Every year, as one cohort of incoming students is accepted and another crop starts filling out applications, colleges across the country calculate one last measurement of their admission season success: the yield.
 
The admission yield percentage reflects the number of accepted students who have placed deposits, a definitive indicator of the institution they have decided to attend. With that data in hand, colleges also report how many, if any, of their wait-list applicants will be offered admission.
 
We reached out recently to several dozen colleges to find out how many of their accepted applicants had placed deposits and how much those colleges intended to use their wait lists. The preliminary figures, which will be updated as more data arrive, are included in the chart above. (To compare this year’s cohort to previous years’, click on the tabs of the worksheet above. You may also view a printer-friendly version of the chart.)
 
Here are some statistics from the colleges and universities that have reported so far:

Harvard University’s yield has increased again, despite the university’s canceling its Visitas program for admitted students. (The event was canceled when law enforcement officials placed the area on lockdown as they searched for the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings.) This year, 82 percent of Harvard’s admitted students have decided to enroll, giving the institution its highest yield since the class of 1973, according to The Harvard Gazette.

Three other Ivy League institutions — Brown University, Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania — also reported higher yields this year, with each topping 59 percent.

Dartmouth College, the only Ivy League institution that was less selective this year, reported a slight decrease in its yield, according to its student newspaper. Dartmouth reportedly had a 48.5 percent yield this year, down one percentage point from last year.
 
Other universities outside the Ivy League reported high, and increasing, yields.

Stanford University reported a yield of 76.65 percent, higher than last year’s yield of 72.84 percent, as well as the yields of most of the Ivy League institutions that have reported so far.

Claremont McKenna College and the University of Chicago report that a majority of their accepted students have decided to enroll this year, giving each institution a noticeably higher yield than last year, when each fell below 50 percent.
 
Most of the yields reported on our far-from-comprehensive list are well below 50 percent, which may indicate an increasing number of options for students who applied to multiple schools. In fact, some admission officers have told me that this is part of the rationale behind placing such large numbers of students on the wait list. As more students apply to more institutions, it is becoming more difficult for colleges to predict who will enroll, just as it is becoming more difficult for students to predict where they’ll get in. Even when students are placed on a wait list, there is no guarantee that they’ll stay; many deferred applicants may choose to enroll elsewhere, so the dozen or so who are eventually accepted from the wait list are selected from a thinned-out crowd.
 
This isn’t to excuse the strategies that are played in the admission game, of course. There are many ways in which colleges and universities can make their yields, and themselves, look good. Just as institutions can make themselves look more desirable by broadcasting low acceptance rates, they can also defer students who they believe are likely to enroll elsewhere. By not accepting those students, the institution is able to appear more selective, report a higher yield and, perhaps, increase its ranking in some publications and its aura of prestige among prospective students.
 
We will update this post as more data come in. If you’d like to comment on the admission season this year, please feel free to do so using the comments box.
 
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
 
Correction: May 30, 2013
 
An earlier version of this post included incorrect data from Olin College of Engineering. The college reported on May 30 that it admitted 133 students to the class of 2017, not 803 (or 132, as it reported earlier on Thursday), giving it a yield of 60.15 percent, not 9.96 percent (or 60.61 percent, as previously reported on Thursday). For the class of 2016, it admitted 151 students, not 781, giving it a yield of 53.64 percent, not 10.37 percent. For the class of 2015, Olin admitted 126 students, not 768, giving it a yield of 55.56 percent, not 9.11 percent.
 
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
 
Correction: May 30, 2013
 
An earlier version of this post misidentified the number of students who were invited to join the University of Michigan's wait list for the class of 2015. The university invited 14,659 students to join its wait list that year, and 4,498 of them -- the statistic previously displayed -- accepted that invitation.