This year Bates made a concerted effort to recruit heavily from outside the Northeast, an area they’ve pretty much saturated. Bates has historically had a strong reputation in New England and surrounding states, and to a lesser extent on the West Coast, but has been less well known in the South and Midwest. I believe they’re trying to change that. Some of the largest increases were from these newly targeted areas as well as from international students.
Bates also did away with their previous rather onerous supplemental essay. It required students to write about a portion of the school’s mission statement, meaning students couldn’t repurpose an essay, such as the “Why us?” essay from another school.
The following is copied from my own post elsewhere:
I wonder if part of the increase in international student applications was due to the fact that the Bates supplement required applicants to dissect a part of the Bates mission statement. Language like “With ardor and devotion—Amore ac Studio—we engage the transformative power of our differences, cultivating intellectual discovery and informed civic action” may have been daunting for applicants for whom English was a second language.
-The new American Talent Initiative,“Colleges working collaboratively to expand access and opportunity for highly-talented lower-income students,” of which Bates is a founding member.
-A new digital and computational studies major.
-Good press as a result of a $50 million donation from a Bates alumni family, the largest single gift to a Maine college ever.
-Continuing communication about the Bates Purposeful Work program.
It’s also possible that Bates’ “story” reads particularly well at this moment in our country’s history. At a time when we’ve seen strife over race, gender, sexuality, hazing and other issues central to American campuses and our society in general, Bates is a school that admitted women and blacks from the start and has never had fraternities or sororities, moves that took some of its peers a hundred years or more to catch up with.