Colleges Reject
Record Numbers
Policies at Harvard, Princeton
Create Uncertainty at Elites;
The college-admissions season set records this year -- both in the number of students who applied, as well as the number of students who were rejected.
Harvard University has a record applicant pool of 27,462 and an admissions rate of 7.1%, meaning that 1,948 students were accepted -- the lowest number in the school's history and a drop from last year's 8.9%.
Yale University received 22,813 applications and accepted only 8.2%, down from 9.6% last year. And at Princeton University, of the 21,369 applications, 9.3% were accepted, down from 9.5% last year.
State schools, too, reporting declining admission rates. The University of Texas received 29,288 applications, up 9%. It admitted 44%, down from 51% last year. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, applications rose 6.6% to 21,496. It accepted 32%, compared with 34.1% last year.
"This was really the ugliest year I've seen," says Marybeth Kravets, a college counselor at Deerfield High School in Illinois. More students were rejected or wait-listed this year. "Some of these larger universities just did not take very many kids."
On the positive side for some students this season, schools are having a hard time predicting their all-important "yields" -- the percentage of students admitted who will actually attend. And high-school counselors are hoping that ambiguity will result in more acceptances for students who are on waiting lists -- a strategy schools use to reach enrollment targets.
"On the counseling side, this is our most promising and realistic hope for wait-list activity," says Bari Norman, director of Expert Admissions LLC in Miami. For the past couple of years, many elite schools have anticipated drawing from their waiting lists but ended up taking few or no applicants because of higher-than-expected yields.
Two factors are driving the unpredictability in this year's college-admissions process. First, both Harvard and Princeton universities eliminated their early-applicant programs this year. That means students who otherwise would have secured a spot at one of these schools in the fall also applied to other schools. Second, moves by highly selective schools to increase financial aid for middle- to upper-income students put the high tuition bills within reach of more families.
"With the change at Harvard and Princeton and all the moves made on the financial aid side, we just feel completely unable to predict what the yield will be," says Jeff Brenzel, dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale University. "We're guessing the yield will fall some because more top students have applied to top schools." For the past couple of years, Yale's overall yield has ranged from 70% to 71%.
Yields are important to colleges because they are closely monitored by competing schools, potential donors and applicants as an indication of the college's appeal. In recent years, they have become tougher to forecast because of the growing population of high-school students and a rise in applications per student. College counselors say many students today apply at 10 to 12 schools, with some applying to as many as 20.
Some colleges changed their strategies as a result of the Harvard and Princeton decisions on early admissions. For instance, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology admitted 522 students early this year compared with last year's 390 because it saw a stronger early-applicant pool. Students who normally would have applied early to Harvard and Princeton applied to MIT's early-admissions program, which is nonbinding, meaning that even if they're accepted, students aren't obliged to attend, says Stuart Schmill, dean of admissions at MIT.
Swarthmore College accepted more students this year -- 929 compared with 890 at this time last year. Yet its admissions rate of 15% was lower than last year's 16% because of a rise in applications. "We took a few more because I think our yield might go down a bit," says Jim Bock, dean of admissions and financial aid at the Pennsylvania school.
