about 5% of the times that it's claimed. The number of times I witnessed what could be called 'yield protection' is DRAMATICALLY lower than the number of times we admitted students outside of our normal profile.

Every single year, the top 3 students from a certain highschool went to HYP, but we still admitted them at Penn most years because they were extremely desirable, talented young people. Universities genuinely don't spend a lot of time worrying about admitting the people they think they'll yield, and instead worry about how to become better at yielding students they tend to lose out on.

We did huge studies at Penn on how we could be more appealing to students that we lost out on to certain places. We found that there were some things we could improve and made those recommendations to the president's office, while also presenting the things that we couldn't compete with (for example, a student who chooses Stanford because of the location is never going to choose Penn. We can do a lot, but we can't make Philly like Palo Alto.)

Honestly during my time, the only students that we HONESTLY didn't take because of yield protection that I personally interacted with (About 20% of the population-- others could have been during sculpting by the dean but that's above my pay grade) were Kenyan track recruits. They *ALL* went to Stanford, because an incredibly famous kenyan runner was coaching their team at the time-- it was impossible to compete with, so we didn't waste our energy.