The Office of Undergraduate Admission announced that 2,040 high school students from across the country and around the world have been admitted to the Class of 2022.
This year Stanford received 47,450 applications.
https://news.stanford.edu/2018/03/30/offers-admission-2040-students/
I know ! mind boggling!
Last year, they accepted 2085 for a class of 1703 students. The yield was 81.6%.
About 40 students could be accepted from the waitlist.
The 4.3% is pure fiction. Only around 5000 to 6000 students have any real chance of being accepted at Stanford, and even less at Harvard. A few things drive this fiction: (1) Stanford aggressively markets students to apply, knowing they are being a bit disingenuous (ie most have zero chance); (2) common app allows for easy application to multiple schools; (3) there is huge overlap among applicants to top schools. If you solicit a lot of kids to apply with the “I still have a chance” attitude, certainly your admit rate will be low. Such a false statistic. Silly. SAD.
@Bobby96 - I have no idea what Stanford’s marketing is like now. However, when my ds applied four years ago, he did not receive a single mailing from them.
@Bobby96 Are you implying that most applicants including many on CC are not qualified for Stanford? So, what qualifications do you think the applicants should have?
crazy
@Bobby96 This is such an overstatement. Sorry to be blunt. (1) all schools do similar. I would say Stanford is better than most (it is not a wannabe, it doesn’t need to do the marketing as aggressively). Outreach to URM, first gen, potential Pell grantees - yes, definitely - all schools are guilty as charged - is that a bad thing? (2) There are probably 5000 applications Stanford receives from China alone that can graduate from any top US school with honors, plus 5000 from East Coast private schools alone that can do the same, in that 47,450 pile. (and another 5000 from West Coast private schools, and public schools, etc). As many people have said, take the top student from every school, you’d already more than 20,000. Perhaps not all 47,450 have a real chance, but it’s not just 6,000.
Most have a near zero chance not because they are not qualified. Most have a near zero chance because there can only be so many winners in a lottery. Like you and I have a near zero chance in Powerball and MegaMillions - but nothing wrong with the lottery itself. It is not mainly because Stanford (or any other school) is aggressively marketing to them.
Bobby, I honestly thought my kid had only a sliver of a chance — even less than other average applicants to Stanford — but he got in last year as REA. Many denied kids had higher hard stats than my kid. And no, my kid has no hook.
@Bobby96 At least from my personal experience that was not the case.
I kept every piece of college mail that I received since the first one sent to me after my 9th grade PSAT. The first was from Vanderbilt, BTW.
In total, I received 490 pieces of physical mail and 3610 emails from 112 schools (as of March 25th). I received the most contacts (mail and email combined) from Sait Mary’s College (130) and the least, 1 each, from Earlham, Neumont, and Point Loma.
Of the schools that I applied (18), I received 134 mailings and 575 emails. Those schools were Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Penn, Dartmouth, Cornell, Williams, Columbia, UChicago, Amherst, Swarthmore, Rice, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon, Smith, and Case Western. Of those, Stanford sent the least (3). In fact, the next on the list was Princeton at 14. Schools like Harvard (33), Dartmouth (42), Columbia(54), and Cornell (43) sent exponentially more.
To make matters worse, the 2 emails I received from Stanford were simply responses to me signing up for their local information session. Thus, in reality, I only received 1 unsolicited contact from Stanford. Because of the virtual blackout of contact from Stanford, I thought that I had NO shot at an acceptance. Somehow, someway, I got lucky and was accepted!!!
Like most people from California, Stanford is the DREAM, but it is considered so unattainable (especially for Californians) that I never really considered it. Don’t get me wrong, I worked very hard on the application, but I chose Princeton EA because I thought my Stanford chances were zero either way. Had I known there was even a sliver of hope, I would have applied to Stanford EA. The lack of mail from them was a huge factor in my thinking, so I wish they would have bombarded me, it MIGHT have saved me months of anxiety.
For the record:
Accepted: Stanford, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Williams, Smith, and Case Western.
Waitlisted: Harvard, Dartmouth, Columbia, UChicago, Amherst, Rice, and Vanderbilt.
Rejected: Yale, Princeton (Deferred EA), Penn, Swarthmore, and Northwestern.
@Bobby96 ; When my dd was a high school student, Dd got a lot of marketing flyers from different colleges, including ivyleague colleges.My dd didn’t get any of little tiny postcard from Stanford. Well, Idk why. Dd was admitted to Stanford, Harvard, MIT etc. dd got multiple flyers from MIT, Harvard but nothing from Stanford.
Congrats on your admission @Maschinenmädchen I think you will love it there but you have great choices too.
@bronze2 Thank you so much for your kind words. It is only 3.5 hours from my home in the Central Valley, and the financial aid makes it the most affordable. BTW, I keep finding it necessary to check the portal to make sure I read it correctly. And, last night I had nothing but nightmares about my counselor insisting that I was misreading it and was actually rejected. 
@Bonbby96 I literally never got any marketing whatsoever from Stanford and I got in but…
Stanford benefits from the fact that it has very little competition for applicants in the category of private research universities west of the Mississippi River. Literally. Apart from USC and Caltech, the next closest private school competitors are Rice University in Houston and WashU in St. Louis.
@harvardandberkeley
That, and being one of the best, possibly THE best, universities in the world.
@riley2 How many Stanford UNDERGRADS have gone on to win a Nobel Prize in Physics, Chemistry, Econ, or Medicine? Would you be surprised that it has only been 2?? Ever. Ever ever! Eric Cornell won the 2001 Physics Nobel. Dudley Herschbach won the Chemistry Nobel in 1986 (Herschbach was my chemistry professor at Harvard, where he got his graduate degree).
Harvard, on the other hand, has had 24 undergrads go on to win the Nobel Prize… and they weren’t ones long ago… half of those came AFTER Stanford’s last Nobel Prize winning undergrad in 2001.
Now, you may think I’m cherry-picking with Nobel Prize winning undergrads… but you could repeat with grad degrees, and again Harvard pummels Stanford in the past and in the new millennium. In fact, ranking universities by Nobel Prize winners who earned ANY degree from the institution, Harvard is #1 and Stanford isn’t even in the top 15. You can restrict to Nobel Prizes only in the new millennium (a common refrain from Stanford folks is that Stanford is a “new” university and is surpassing Harvard now)… but no, again, Stanford is still way behind.
I’ll grant you that Stanford has quite a few Nobel Prize winners on campus… but Stanford does what Stanford does… which is woos them, often later in their careers, with money and sunshine… sure, I’m not surprised many Nobel Prize winners want to retire at Stanford… it really is a BEAUTIFUL school with fabulous weather and very smart students. It really is popular and the “dream school” for many students.
There was a previous thread where it was discussed how Stanford underperforms even in Turing Awards for Computer Science, supposedly their specialty.
Don’t get me wrong, Stanford is indeed one of the best universities in the history of the world. But “THE” Best? Um, no. Other schools have more of a right to claim that title from Harvard (such as Columbia, Chicago, Cambridge, Princeton, Oxford).
@harvardandberkeley
I’m just pulling your chain. It’s fun seeing the contortions Harvard folks go through explaining why their admit rate is higher than Stanford’s. Don’t despair, it will probably flip in the next year or two. And when it does, no one from Stanford will care.
And with one of the best sports programs for student-age athletes.
https://www.romper.com/p/why-do-so-many-olympians-attend-stanford-over-30-students-alums-made-it-to-rio-16153
http://fortune.com/2016/08/09/stanford-olympics-athletes-college/
Stanford Cardinal has won the Directors’ Cup for NCAA Div 1 college athletics every year since 1994
http://facts.stanford.edu/campuslife/athletics
If it was just the weather and facilities, there are many other good California and Florida schools, but these athletes choose Stanford.
Stanford is the best overall program not necessarily because it is the best at something (e.g., Villanova for basketball, Alabama for football), but because it is consistently near the top at almost everything.
As with sports, so it seems with Stanford being popular as a university. Its consistency across everything is what makes it so desirable to many.
Faculty - it does not have to be the “best” but it is consistently well recognized by peer academics, by industry and by employers.
Endowment - not the largest: Harvard has that. Relevance to students: amongst the most generous financial aid packages and therefore, lowest net price.
Renowned engineering department - people can argue it is not #1, but it does not have to be. It attracts too many students already, even in the opinion of Stanford administration.
Location - not just weather, but silicon valley (though earthquake prone!)
Graduate schools - medicine, law, business, each a leader though again they don’t each need to be #1. This might be of limited relevance to undergraduates, but it all makes for a strong brand.
Facilities and plant: ultra modern. The engineering quad as an example was built in the last 10 years. Much of the undergraduate and graduate housing also went up in the last 10 years. And more coming (science labs, housing…). The central campus density is twice as built up as it was 20 years ago.
But it still has 8000 acres of unspoiled land.
@harvardandberkeley Facts and facts, Harvard has more Nobels. But there’s no Nobel for many things which are worthwhile. My college (one of the colleges from your “best” list in England) boasted for a long time it had more Nobels than all of Russia at one time - one single college of 500 students. To this day, the dons at High Table at my college are blissfully discussing who among them will next win a Nobel Prize (I’ve been party to those conversations). And? It only had 3 applicants for every place, and now has 4 or 5 applicants for every place it has available. Stanford had more, and now it has about 28 applicants per place (47450 / 1700) - which is not that ridiculous compared to the number of applicants per place in some New York prep schools and high schools, private or public.
Here’s a good set of trivia of how unbalanced demand and supply can be: http://www.businessinsider.com/things-harder-to-get-into-than-harvarad-2016-11
Pulitzer prizes, poet laureates, justices, Rhodes scholars, billionaires, CEO’s, presidents and prime ministers - all great individual achievements, but let’s be real, this is not what draws most people to apply to a school. How about the Olympic medals Stanford students have won? Sure, impressive, but do the football players care at all about that when they are recruited by Stanford? I think that’s a fair analogy.
As other posters have established, it is not Stanford which sends out marketing material and aggressively advertising. This is a phenomenon of the applicants wanting to buy into their dream - why do they want it more than other schools? HYP all have similarly generous financial aid, all have strong brands. We try to offer reasons, but ask them. The school is not to blame. It’s probably reaching a crisis level to have to handle so many applications.
I am not sure what you’re trying to say. If the message is that Stanford isn’t one of the best and its undergraduates are not particularly outstanding, that’s your opinion and you are entitled to it. You have your statistics to support your case. But go tell it to the applicants who are not agreeing with you. We can debate “best” all day long, but the fact is people keep wanting something it more and more. Fact. Objective. Best or not, it is attractive. It is just demand and supply. It attracts a crowd (like the Indian Institute of Management - 100 applicants per spot. Saying it’s not the best will do nothing to deter the applicants). So, is the crowd a dumb lot?