Application of overbooking model to college admission at The Citadel

Abstract

AbstractThe admission office in almost every four‐year college faces the challenge of determining the number of students to be admitted each year, because only a small percentage of the students enroll after being accepted (called yield rate). The national average yield rate in four‐year colleges and universities has declined. At The Citadel under normal circumstances, it is even more challenging since the cadets are required to stay on campus where the beds in the barracks are limited. An insufficient number of freshmen enrolled at The Citadel result in a loss of revenue, and too many freshmen enrolled results in shortage of beds. In this paper, we conduct a case study and apply the overbooking model in revenue management to find the optimal admission limit at The Citadel. We perform a computation experiment on the enrollment data to obtain the optimal admission limit for the academic year 2020–2021. Also, over the last five years, we have compared the admission limit obtained using the risk‐based policy to the admission limit obtained using the deterministic heuristic method, and with the actual admission number from the historical data. The results of this case study can be used by the admission office at The Citadel to measure its past performance, identify strategies, and make informed admission decisions in the near future.