<p>A few things I noticed. 389 first year students is above their targeted class size of 383. It appears that info from this summer that the class was over-enrolled was indeed true. I believe this is the largest freshman class in Swarthmore history.</p>
<p>The acceptance rate was 22%. It appears that this is the lowest acceptance rate going back to at least 1970 (23%), as far back as the public data goes.</p>
<p>The yield of 43.2% is the highest since 1980 (44%).</p>
<p>They achieved a nearly equal split of female (50.9%) to male (49.1%). This has got to make the admissions office happy.</p>
<p>Diversity increased over last year's class with Af-Am enrollment up 1%, Latino up 2%, Asian-American up 2%, and International up 1%. 44% of the class is non-white and/or non-US. This compares to 38% of the entire college and 40% of the freshman class last year. </p>
<p>Af-Am yield is still low with 7% of the enrolled freshmen versus 12% of the accepted students. Yield among Latina and Asian-American is much closer to the overall yield although still lower than white yield.</p>
<p>I don't have historic data for comparison, but the percentage of public school freshmen is quite high: 62% public, 25% private, 5% parochial, 8% overseas. I suspect that this is characteristic differentiates Swarthmore from some other elite LACs and may well contribute to the campus culture. Many of these diversity-related stats may be driven by very high Asian-American enrollment (17% of the freshman class).</p>
<p>We'll have to wait for the new Common Data Set for info on financial aid percentages, etc.</p>
<p>Interesteddad, how do you know about the yield? Is it from how many they said they admitted in April and December?</p>
<p>One interesting fact: there was one time a talk here about how many chose Swarthmore over HYPS in this very forum and some Harvard parents visited and made comments here. This is just one person I know about, but a kid my son and his roommates hosted chose Swarthmore over Harvard. My son and his roommates went out of their way to make sure he loved his RTT experience. They really liked him. He is now living in the same room (and in fact the same bed) as my son used to last year. Just an interesting fact, and please don't flame me for mentioning this. Harvard is a world class university and I mean no disrespect! Just an observation....there are a few people who actually do that.
There is also my son's roommate this year (a junior majoring in Chinese language and some other subject) who chose Swarthmore over Harvard.
:)</p>
<p>I can vouch for that--my daughter ('09) chose Swarthmore readily over Yale. I believe she knows at least one other person who chose it over Harvard. So far she doesn't regret it at all!</p>
<p>It's a bit like comparing apples to oranges: Swat is small, intimate etc while Harvard and Yale are much larger and more impersonal. There are pluses and minuses to each type of environment which I won't list in this thread. Its really a matter of personal preferences and priorities.
Its clear from the admissions data that there would be considerable overlap in the application pools.</p>
<p>The yield is based on the number of acceptances in the April press release. It could change a small amount based on the Common Data set info; however, I don't look for large numbers of waitlisted students factoring in this year.</p>
<p>The incoming class was over-enrolled from early on andsummer melt never got them down to the targeted class size. I would be surprised if there were more than a dozen or so wait-list acceptances. Unlike last year, there were not enough waitlist offers to change the acceptance rate between the April and Sept. press releases.</p>
<p>I haven't seen anything on SAT scores other than the general observation that the median is about the same.</p>
<p>Any changes to the overall median would have to come from lower end of the scale. They have only been accepting 40% of the applicants with an 800 SAT on either the math or verbal, according to Jim Bock. Now, that's still a better acceptance rate than students who didn't score an 800, but if they wanted to bump the stats, they probably could. As it is, over 20% of the freshman class typically scores a perfect 800 on at least one.</p>
<p>With Swarthmore's admissions priorities, I don't see them deciding to admit fewer low-stat [sic] students.</p>