College Admissions Statistics Class of 2021: Early and Regular Decision Acceptance Rates

I’ve been watching for Pomona to release the stats on ED but so far haven’t seen anything. Last year they admitted 196/1004 via ED1/ED2 and the year before that it was 175/1157. Wondering if that means the RD acceptance rate fell below 7% this year. Yikes.

@keiekei

Well, the statistics doesn’t bear this out. Williams had a huge increase in applications this year, more than 20%.

I heard 180 were admitted through ED from the same source that told me 9000 students applied, but I’m not sure if that includes QuestBridge (16 students) and Posse (22 students). My guess is that it doesn’t, because according to this article from last year (http://tsl.news/news/5520/), it says 914 applications, 177 admitted, but excludes QB/Posse. The CDS link says 1004 applications received, 196 admitted total, but includes Posse/QB, and it seems there could be the possibility that several of those applications went from QB Match to EDII, which is allowed.

I don’t know how many applied, though. But if 218 spots in the class are filled, and the class size is 415, Pomona is anticipating an RD yield of 37.7%- 197 remaining spots/(741 total admits - 218 ED/QB/Posse admits). Pomona’s RD yield last year was 37.8%, so it seems all in order.

Application count is one of the easiest metrics to manipulate. Williams was extremely aggressive in marketing this past yr, judging by the amount of bumf in our mailbox compared to its peers.
The real test is that few top students want to go to Williams if they can get into a top national university. The LACs as a whole have gone down in prestige.

@keiekei Williams also had a 25% increase in ED applicants so… I think you are just trying to use the gender classification as a way to bash LACs. In the mean time, more serious issues like riots at Yale, Princeton, and Berkeley are totally okay because they are big universities? Certainly there are less students wanting to go to LACs than universities, but that is literally the whole selling point of LACs. Smaller student body thus more attention to each individual student.

UCLA: if you click on the site, there is a pop-up note to admittees saying that they received more than 102,000 applications and accepted less than 1 in 5 applications.

https://www.admission.ucla.edu/newBruins.htm

UVA is out.

http://uvaapplication.blogspot.com/

@Corinthian - Pomona’s RD acceptance is 8.2% this year.

No @TiggerDad , 8.2% includes the ED applications.

@williams2021 it’s def true that I was randomly picking on Williams’ silly gender pandering, but I’m dead serious that LAC prestige has gone down. It used to be harder to get into Amherst than into Harvard. Williams’ admit rate used to be one-fourth that of Vandy; now they’re about the same. Now at my daughter’s school, no top students apply to top LACs. This is a big change. I suspect the reasons for this are complex but include: rise of Asians and their preference for national universities, or failing that, flagship state schools; efforts by big schools to adopt some of the popular features of LACs; preference for STEM and computer science (this would also in part explain why Stanford is now more popular than Harvard).

Res ipsa loquitur!

I find that a bit disappointing. I mean, you don’t get that big of an increase YoY without some major marketing. I always admired Williams for being more restrained in its marketing than Shameless Swarthmore, which achieved a 40% YoY increase recently through marketing tactics that would make the Coca-Cola advertising Dept. blanch. Williams has long had a higher admit rate than its peers (Amherst, Pomona, Swat), but has held the #1 spot on USNWR for like fourteen straight yrs. But maybe they are getting insecure now that Pomona and Swat fall into single digit admit rates.

Is this really the thread to discuss this? One thing to realize is that the LAC applicant pool is generally more self selective and stronger as a whole than the top universities. Compare Amherst (https://www.amherst.edu/media/view/669797) to Stanford (http://admission.stanford.edu/basics/selection/profile.html). Of those submitting the SAT at Amherst, 60% of applicants had above a 700 on the CR, and 10% had below a 600. Stanford says 46% of applicants had above a 700, while 20% had below a 600. The statistics for all the other sections look similar (math SAT at amherst- 64% above a 700, 6% below a 600; Stanford 58% above a 700, 14% below a 600). The LAC pools are self-selective because these schools are not well known to a general audience; you’re not getting students who’re just throwing their apps to see if they can get in like what happens at Stanford and other universities. Also, schools like U’Chicago and Vanderbilt have been aggressively mailing and marketing in the last few years, while some LACs like Haverford and Davidson have remained pretty quiet on that end. The quality of these institutions hasn’t changed much, if at all. A decreased acceptance rate doesn’t mean Vanderbilt is suddenly better than Williams (Vanderbilt’s admit rate is actually 10.7% now, compared to 17.5% at Williams last year).

While I agree with @nostalgicwisdom, I also think this thread is supposed to focus on objective admissions statistics, not on subjective arguments about prestige.

Is there any information on American RD?

Barnard College: https://barnard.edu/news/nations-top-womens-college-admits-most-selective-class-127-year-history

Brandeis and W&M?

@kbd2121 an admissions officer wrote to me today that there was a 29% admit rate to American U. I assume he meant for RD and not overall, but that is just an assumption.

^ There is something nutty going on at American U. It should not be a 29% admit school given its academics (that is around the same level as BC and Northeastern. GWU was 40% last year), ranking #74 USNWR and the school is not that small (7,200 undergrad). Maybe they are rejecting kids who are just using it as a safety school for Georgetown, GW, etc?

Wake Forest’s admissions blog announced that 750 students had been accepted in ED1 and ED2 (55% of incoming class). There were almost 2000 ED applications ( just less than 1500 ED1/just less than 500 ED2). The blog states that RD acceptance rate was 25%. Wake mailed RD decisions (USPS domestic/DHL international) on 3/23.

http://fromtheforest.admissions.wfu.edu

According to AU, their acceptance rates have nosedived over the past few years:

Fall 2014: 46%
Fall 2015: 35%
Fall 2016: 26%

So 29% for Fall 2017 would be consistent with last year’s result. AU claims that they’ve revamped their admissions process to better identify students who are likely to attend, and that the drop in acceptance rates correlates with improved yield. They claimed a 35% yield for Fall 2016 (GWU was 25%). This approach could, in theory, include “rejecting kids who are just using it as a safety school”.
http://www.american.edu/alumni/news/AU-Welcomes-the-Class-of-2020.cfm