<p>I attended one of President Chopp's "road shows" this evening, and one thing she announced was that we were the first group to hear that Swarthmore has received 6,951 applications this year, the most ever. Over 1,000 of them were from international students.</p>
<p>I'll let someone else do the math as to what this means. ;)</p>
<p>Over 1,000 internationals – that’s astounding! Thanks for the report! That means, for us, that…ughh April is still the same length away :(!</p>
<p>That’s really depressing.</p>
<p>That’s insane.</p>
<p>That’s 15% above last year (6041 applications) and 14% above Swarthmore’s biggest year ever (6121 in 2008).</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/administration/ir/Admissions.pdf[/url]”>http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/administration/ir/Admissions.pdf</a></p>
<p>I had to miss the NYC session last night. How was it?</p>
<p>^^ Me too - too much work to catch up on after all those snow days. Was it a good session?</p>
<p>The session was absolutely packed! I saw alums from classes in the '50s all the way to Class of '08, along with a number of parents. President Chopp spoke for about 20 minutes or so, without notes, explaining what was happening on campus, highlighting certain students and professors. There will be an arts weekend in April this year (15th-17th) featuring many music, theatre and arts performances, and she urged the alums and parents to attend and interact with the students on campus.</p>
<p>She opened up the floor to a discussion about what Swarthmore can do to better prepare students for this century and then had a general Q&A. There was quite a bit of discussion about the need for students nowadays to learn how to network, how to have a conversation with someone in person, speak on the phone, when to write a thank you note, etc. One fairly recent alum told how she had hosted two students for a one week externship (shadowing her in her work environment) and neither had written a thank you note! I think that beyond the thank you note issue, her point was that they were losing out on a valuable opportunity to network, by keeping in touch with her.</p>
<p>I do think that with these numbers, the overall acceptance rate may fall to 14%, given the recently “traditional” 40% yield.</p>
<p>Over 1000 intl… And last year they accepted 76, and only 26 enrolled. I guess don’t feel too bad if you’re rejected then</p>
<p>I wonder how yield rates are going to work out this year. Not just for Swarthmore. I suspect this is a year where waiting lists will be fairly dynamic and involve more movement and less waiting than past years. So many of the top colleges are posting record numbers – when, if I’m correct, the nation has past the peak, population-wise, for new college students. That seems to indicate that high school seniors are applying to more colleges than ever. (Perhaps because they’ve observed college admissions getting increasingly competitive, which would at least partly explain the lag between application numbers peaking and the number of individual applicants peaking.) And yet they can only choose one college. That part’s constant. So I’m predicting that there are all the more colleges that are going to get denied.</p>
<p>^Isn’t that “population peak” just for U.S. college students, though?</p>
<p>That’s my understanding. I actually don’t know of a source for it…just gossip along the lines of “Well, this was the toughest year ever for college applications because this year’s high school class is the largest ever. Next year it’s going down so your son/daughter is lucky and won’t have as much competition as my deary.” I could be way off the mark and apologize for injecting that as though I have hard data to back that up.</p>
<p>D’yer Maker-I agree that “anecdotally,” I have always heard that the college class of 2013 was the largest, followed by the college class of 2014. At some point I think I saw a link to some actual stats along those lines.</p>
<p>This study is a couple of years old but probably still on the money. Note the link from the Inside Higher Ed article to the underlying study does not work.</p>
<p>[News:</a> Demographic Boom and Bust - Inside Higher Ed](<a href=“http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/03/20/projections]News:”>http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/03/20/projections)</p>
<p>For the real number crunchers, here is a link to the underlying study that works:
<a href=“http://www.wiche.edu/info/publications/knocking_complete_book.pdf[/url]”>http://www.wiche.edu/info/publications/knocking_complete_book.pdf</a></p>
<p>The number of high school graduates was predicted to peak with the high school class of 2008, then decline a total of 4.5% to the high school class of 2014, before beginning to rise again. This decline from 2008 - 2014 is relatively small - averaging a decline of only 0.8% per year for 6 years. The changes we may see in applications and enrollments do not seem to be driven by major changes in the number of high school graduates - it is more likely due to a greater percentage of kids applying to college and/or more applications per high school graduate.</p>
<p>It’s more complex than just the total number of high school graduates. The tradition customer base for elite colleges has been white students from New England and the Mid Atlantic (inc. NYC).</p>
<p>While the total number of US high school graduates fall from 2008 and then starts to rebound in a few years, that rebound is almost exclusively driven by Hispanic high school graduates in the South and Southwest. White (and African American) high school graduates continue to declince nationally. And, the total high school graduates in the New England and Mid Atlantic regions fall significantly for the next decade.</p>
<p>It is reasonable to surmise that the recent push for diversity may not be altogether “altruistic” in motivation. In a very real sense, positioning an east coast college to attract Hispanic and Asian American customers is a matter of survival. There are real analogies to colleges looking to offset declining demographics in the post-baby boom era of the 1970s by going coed and attracting women customers.</p>
<p>Here’s a link to the various charts. Scroll down and look the charts for the # of high school graduates thru 2022 by region.</p>
<p>[Higher</a> Education Landscape](<a href=“http://professionals.collegeboard.com/data-reports-research/trends/higher-ed-landscape]Higher”>http://professionals.collegeboard.com/data-reports-research/trends/higher-ed-landscape)</p>
<p>Oh, that’s just great…! I knew we started the family too early. Because of that my kids are going to miss out on applying as URMs in 2022.</p>
<p>Does the recent climb in application numbers to top colleges/universities imply more qualified applicants or more Joe Bloggs (I think that was the name…) type applicants?</p>
<p>…or the same number of applicants applying to more colleges?</p>
<p>Why is the acceptance rate going down ? I will expect colleges to accept more applicants since students will typically have more choices since they are applying to more places.</p>
<p>db - Many schools have had to recently update their algorithms because contrary to what you would believe and what seems logical, their yields have turned out higher then expected. This has lead to a more conservative approach and a higher reliance on the use of the dreaded “wait list.” If anyone needs empirical data Bowdoin and Dartmouth come to mind… I’d have to go back and find those articles but I believe I’m accurately stating the general idea. There’s no sense in trying to figure out what admissions rates will be or won’t be since all that really matters is if YOU are accepted or not. I know it’s hard, but the wait is almost over. This process seems to get crazier and crazier every year.</p>
<p>The figure, 6581 for 2011 applications has been cited on two sites, including</p>
<p>[COLLEGE</a> APPLICATIONS - The Choice Blog - NYTimes.com](<a href=“http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/category/college-applications/page/2/]COLLEGE”>http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/category/college-applications/page/2/)</p>
<p>Can the figure at the top of this thread and this figure be reconciled?</p>