Among the matters that college admissions officers at America's elite post-secondary institutions must take into consideration in evaluating application packages from hopeful prospective students are quite simply matters of protecting their rankings among other colleges. Although there are several means of acquiring information about which colleges are best - and more importantly, which colleges are best for a given student in particular - many prospective students buy into the national college rankings compiled each year by various organizations. Thus, being mindful of the factors that weigh into these factors has become a fairly significant element in making college admissions decisions.
One major concern among elite colleges and universities is maintaining or increasing the quality of its incoming freshman class, which is reflected each year by its statistical profile - which is factored into its rankings in comparison with other elite colleges. If one year, a school admits a freshman class with an average cumulative SAT score of 2100, they will not settle for a freshman class with a lower average the following year. This is not simply due to a self-imposed sense of pride in a certain principle value these colleges have personally vested in the SAT. Rather it is due to the value that national college rankings place on such statistics concerning average or median standardized test scores, class rank, GPA, and other such admissions factors. As much as a school may want to extend offers to otherwise extraordinary students who fall short in that respect, they may only reconsider their standards within reason and for a very select few that will not amount to enough damage to impact its precious statistics.
Another major concern for college admissions offices during their decision-making process involves the need to establish diversity within its student body by admitting students from a range of cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. In part, this concern stems from a college's desire to make the undergraduate experience a meaningful living and learning experience beyond the mere academic offerings. Ensuring that not all of its students share similar backgrounds, and essentially look, walk, act, think, and speak the same, is considered to be a major part of rounding out the value of that undergraduate experience. However, there is more to the importance of diversity for these colleges since just as with the SAT scores, these statistics are compared from school to school from year to year and factored into college rankings as well as to future prospects' perspective of a given school. Schools are generally expected to admit as many of each Hispanic, African American, or Asian American students as they did the year before. If any of those numbers slip, their rankings may likely suffer for it, and other interested candidates from those backgrounds may be discouraged or turned off from applying in future years. Neither of these effects is desirable to colleges. After years of criticism for admitting homogenous classes of wealthy white Americans, colleges and their critics began taking diversity very seriously. This is why, contrary to many applicants' understanding, minority students with slightly lower academic qualifications than a school's noted standards may be admitted to the same school that had rejected a more apparently privileged salutatorian. Rather than competing with the applicant pool at large, more often it seems that minority candidates are competing with one another in order to keep a school's related stats constant, at minimum.
Yield, or the percentage of admitted students who actually opt to attend, is another element that is particularly important to colleges since this, too, is factored into their national rankings among other elite colleges. Therefore, admissions offices do have a particular leaning toward qualified applicants who have demonstrated such interest in attending that they reason to believe in the likelihood of their joining them in the fall if extended the invitation. They need to feel that they're admitting students who are actually going to join their ranks - which is one reason a student may be accepted to Harvard yet rejected from Tufts. Tufts may love to have him, but with no reason to believe they're more than a back-up for an obviously stellar candidate who's bound to be admitted to even better schools, sometimes they may decide there's no point in risking their yield over wishful thinking.
