<p>I’d like to hear the explanation for the reduction in enrollment.</p>
<p>There were 3622 admits (with no final word on whether there was any resort to the waitlist.)</p>
<p>There were 2,366 who accepted the offer to enroll, which is 180 less than the 2,566 matriculants for the Class of 2009.</p>
<p>Again assuming zero use of the waitlist, this means that the yield rate was nearly 66%, close behind the 68% yield rate at Princeton,within the Ivies.</p>
<p>At an info session, I remember an admissions counselor saying that due to a larger than expected yield rate for '09, they had to cut back on '10 (mostly for housing allocation). Nothing to worry about really...</p>
<p>Still, it helped lower the admit rate and faculty/student ratio, and raise the yield rate, so I suppose the decision to accept a smaller class won't hurt the USNews ranking.</p>
<p>So I suppose the decision to accept a smaller class won't hurt the USNews ranking.</p>
<p>True, but how could Penn be helped anymore so than it is already being helped? Penn wont, in the near future, move above Harvard, Yale or Princeton. It was already at number 4 last year, and will only keep shifting between around numbers 4 and 8.</p>
<p>Penn overenrolled the class of 2009, so they aggressively estimated the yield and underenrolled the class of 2010 to compensate for things. Class sizes should be about 2400.</p>
<p>And god forbid a good college experience too....</p>
<p>Penn is accepting fewer students to compensate for the logistical strain (housing, resource use, etc) of having taken too many last year. There's nothing mysterious about it.</p>
<p>There are only three schools with a better faculty-student ratio, Byerly. I doubt that this is the reason. Perhaps it is at Harvard, where the ratio is at an unthinkable 7 students per faculty member.</p>
<p>7:1 creates an even more unthinkably inadequate availability of teachers when you factor in the "pompous windbag too good for undergrads" effect permeating the Harvard faculty.</p>
<p>Not only would the admit rate have soared, they would also have admitted many more students than their target class size. Penn admissions even said they were going to decrease the amount of admitted students in response to the increase yield last year.</p>
<p>Supposedly, Penn has also reduced the number of transfer students it accepts from about 265/1534 in 2005 to about 100 or so, at least according to some of the Penn transfer threads.</p>
<p>As everyone has essentially stated, Penn over-enrolled last year with the class of 2009. This caused a number of issues with courses (having to add more sections of classes, hire more people to teach and TA these classes, and find more space to hold these classes) in addition to the crunch on housing.</p>
<p>This has been cited numerous times, so it shouldn't come as a surprise or anything beyond common sense and the desire to give students a positive experience.</p>