Editor:

I read with obvious interest your editorial focusing on the size of the next entering class at Pomona. You do have my attention and I don’t disagree fundamentally with the headline, but the body of the piece contained significant factual errors (which a simple conversation with me or a member of the admissions staff could have corrected) and a false assumption that more rigorous statistical analysis could provide a remedy.

First, I would like to address the sentence which begins, "After two years of over-admitting applicants." Not true.

In each of the last two years the total number of enrolling students has been on target.

While there were more first year students this year due to increased yield, you should know that we ultimately enrolled the targeted number of new students by reducing to only five the number of transfer students entering the College. New students, after all, do include both first year and transfer students, an important consideration missed in your article.

In fact, the number of students offered admission has steadily decreased over recent years. Yield, considered an important barometer of health for an institution, has grown.

We are doing our best in an imperfect science that spins on the decisions of 17 and 18 year students, after all. Do a poll. How many first years knew with absolute certainty what their final college choice would be (not counting early decision!) in early March?

The housing crunch was addressed by reducing tranfer admission numbers. Mid year transfer programs have been suspended for the past two years.

Tight housing is not because of shifts in admission. Tight housing is, in part, because fewer students have taken leaves of absence and fewer have opted for off-campus housing in recent years. That was a picture not fully available until after admission letters had been mailed. The College has changed that calendar, somewhat.

For the record, at this time we do have a plan to reduce the size of the entering Class of 2006. Final figures, however, have not been set and you should know that key variables include some things which may be documented and others which call for speculation and extension of trend lines.

Is that double-speak? No.

For those interested in this arcane profession, variables for "available spaces" include dorm rooms, the number of students who will study abroad (and even that changes as departure dates approach) the number of students who apply to live off campus, the number of students who take a leave of absence or, in those very few cases, withdraw from the College and the number of students who may, even sometimes at the very last minute, need to take a medical leave. And, yes, there are College budgetary considerations, too. These are internal factors.

External factors affecting yield include the different yield rates for men and women, differences based upon geographic origins, for financial aid or non-aid students, ethnic background, academic interests, extracurricular intersts, SAT scores, type of high school attended, athletic team participation and still others. Still other factors which may affect yield are merit scholarships at other institutions, the other schools to which a student has been offered admission, and then, of course, are those things that happen after an offer of admission is received, such as the weather during a post admission visit, the experience with a host or tourguide or the class the student visited, the quality of the food or the amount of sleep they managed to get on the trip to the College.

When the so called Los Angeles (aka Rodney King) "civil unrest" occured on April 29, 1992, only 2 days before the admission deposit deadline of that year, I had no idea what our yield might be. Nothing in my professional experience prepared me for that event’s likely impact on our entering class yield.

The shorter version is this: Even the most rigorous statistical analysis won’t fully map the human factor of decision making for 17 and 18 year old students. You know that, and so do we. We work with the best general predictors we can when we make offers of admission and, conscious of space, we don’t apply all of that statistical science to each and every admission applicant because we are trying to make this a process that focuses on students as people and the institution while we read closely those things that are truly pertinent to the development of a remarkable place, not just tags in a regression analysis formula. There are other colleges and universities for that! No need to take my word for this. If you didn’t wish to chat with a member of the admissions staff, someone could have spoken with the chair of the admissions committee, Gary Smith. No one knowledgeable would question his capabilities as a statistician.

In the end, the editorial board must ask itself an honest question, too. If this were the CBS show, Survivor, who would you have voted off of our "island"? Which 18 first year students would have to leave? (It could have been one of the TSL staff, after all!)

In the future, feel free to give me a call. I appreciate the chance to set the record straight and debunk this particular "urban legend", but at the same time, I urge the editors to exploit all the resources in this educational environment before jumping to unfounded conclusions. We are all here to learn and honest questions get honest answers.

Sincerely,

Bruce Poch

Vice President and Dean of Admissions