Okay fixed by @SJ2727. I wonder what the spring admit stats look like?
@SJ2727 Some math issues in your stats. 3,100/62,210 would be 4.9%
or 18.1% of 62210 would be 11,260
@T20hopeful2023 ugh yes I should have picked that up. 18.1% is the provided admit rate, 3100 is the number of freshmen expected to enrol in the fall. So admits would be around 11.2k with an expected yield around 28%.
Did BU admit too many people last year? Their applications are down by 2250 and their admit rate dropped from 22% to 18% (about 3k less admits). The 2022 enrolled class was 3620. 3100 is a big drop.
@T20hopeful2023 - I’m hoping @TomSrOfBoston comes in as he seems to have much more inside info. It looks like they are shifting some of the freshman class to spring so total enrollment isn’t as low as it looks, but the fall admit number looks lower.
Application numbers might be down but it’s still a big number! I will say, when we went to an info session last year they certainly seemed to be emphasizing the increased competitiveness of applying rather than trying to solicit everyone to apply. There have also been a lot of rejections/waitlists of people in the thread this year of people whose stats one would think were a very solid match, some pretty strong stats turned down. Seems to have been the case among a number of schools - tough season.
@T20hopeful2023 @SJ2727 Starting this cycle all students admitted to the BU College of General Studies start in January not September. CGS has always been the division for applicants whose stats do not meet BU’s requirements for their other programs. So that is 600 lower statted students entering in January and those stats do not affect the published stats. They are not included in the 18% acceptance rate nor in the 3100 strong September entering class. Also the SAT/ACT averages are for admitted students. The stats for enrolled students will be lower.
And BU people used to look down on Northeastern for "gaming’ the rankings! LOL
Interesting - I don’t know how I would feel about having to wait a semester to start college. If it was my 1st choice, it might be worth the wait.
@TomSrOfBoston That’s a good one. Lol. That’s gaming 101!
?
Harvey Mudd - 544 admits from 4,045 applicants (13.4%)
https://www.hmc.edu/admission/admitted/
(click on Admitted Students Profile link at the bottom of this link)
It will be interesting to see if there is a trend in fewer admits when more admission announcements are made in the coming days.
So far, it looks like there is a decline in the number of admits by the schools which have announced. This continues a trend from previous years, but is more noticeable this year. The admit rates had been going down from a combination of more applications and fewer admits, but mostly because of the former. We may see the lower number of admits being the bigger factor this year.
Here are some numbers so far from the highly selective schools (<25% admit rate), comparing admits for Class of 2023 vs Class of 2022. Many schools are making 10% fewer offers of admission, with Colby and WUSTL at about 20% fewer admits than a year ago.
MIT 1,410 v 1,464
Pomona 726 v 780
Harvey Mudd 544 v 594
Colby 1,295 v 1,602
Amherst 1,144 v 1,246
Haverford 801 v 878
Washington & Lee 1,115 v 1,239
Emory 4,512 v 5,104
Emory Oxford 3,432 v 4,144
WUSTL ~3,556 (14% of applicants) v 4,708
USC 7,370 (11% of applicants) v 8,339
Georgia Tech ~6,940 (18.8% of applicants) v 8,037
The following schools have admitted about the same number as last year:
Johns Hopkins 2,950 v 2,894
Swarthmore 995 v 1,020
Hamilton ~1,334 (16% of applicants) v 1,328
Wellesley ~1,298 (20% of applicants) v 1,296
Williams 1,205 v 1,240
UVA 9,725 v 9,828
Waitlist movements may add to the number of admits if yields prove lower than the schools expect, but it is unlikely they will make a substantial difference if the admissions offices have done their job well.
Those figures are interesting to see, @bronze2, but you seem to have compared April admission offers for this year with ~July (i.e., post waiting list) offers for last year?
@merc81 yes I make that distinction in my concluding note. It will make a difference in some schools (eg Pomona added a few admits last year), but I suspect in many cases, the final numbers are not going to be far off.
USC had admitted 8,258 this time last year and its new president last week announced a 11% admission rate which equates to about 7,370 admits for this year. WUSTL was 15% of 31,300 last year and is 14% of 25,400 this year. Emory announced 5,103 for April last year (and took 0 from its waitlist) but admits only 4,512. These are large differences for similar enrollments.
I should add that Boston College is admitting about 10% more this year - at 9,500 admits. But this is probably due to a much higher number of EA admits who are not committed. BC made 3,170 offers to EA applicants last year vs 4,488 offers this year. (However, BC is changing to ED next year.)
Yes, I see that now, @bronze2. Thanks. Nonetheless, it will be interesting to see if the acceptance level for a school such as Colby (down 19%), as well as for the schools you mentioned, will be sustainable.
Would be interesting to see (and we dont get the detailed information from all the schools) to what extent the lower admit numbers overall is linked to taking a higher percentage of admits from the ED pool, which some colleges are doing.
Tulane will be a good one to follow as well. It announced before February (when presumably not all decisions had been made yet and all files read) that the admission rate would be just over 13% from 41,365 applications for this cycle. That would make it about 5,500 admits, compared to 6,725 last year (a 17.5% admit rate was announced in April, with only 2 waitlist admits last year).
@SJ2727
USC and Georgia Tech do not have ED, but many of the others do. (Georgia Tech made fewer EA admits AND fewer RD admits this year.)
Filling a larger percentage of the class from the ED pool is certainly a possibility for the rest. If that turned out to be the case, this would be a trend that future applicants to those schools should note. But if it’s not due to changes in ED, the general decline in the number of admits is noteworthy for a different reason.
@bronze2
GaTech and USC will just accept more transfer students. Similar to what Boston University is doing.
How far back does your admit data go? One thing I wonder about - but don’t know all the data: we know that many schools saw surges in application numbers over the past 5-10 years. If at some point admit numbers had risen somewhat with those (even if not keeping pace), but part of the surge was reflected by the average student submitting more applications (and therefore turning down more offers), then the recent fall could just be something of a normalization? As I say I don’t know the historical admit numbers so this is just speculation.
I know everyone bangs on about yield protection, but from a college perspective, it also just doesn’t make sense to spend the manpower to draw up hundreds or thousands of unnecessary offers.
I think each school probably has its own trajectory. There’s a good website that provides recent historical trends though. For example, WUSTL has had an increasing number of applicants (20k in 2001-02 rising to 31k recently) but a steady number of admits at around 4,700, while its class size has also increased from 1250 to ~1800.
Colby is an example which saw a huge surge in applications (3900 in 2001-02 rising to 13,584 this year) and whereas it used to admit 1300, the admits rose to a high of 1700+ in 2015-2018, before falling back to 1295 this year, with the class size of only 10% larger than that of 2001.
Tulane is another example of a school which has become much more selective, well beyond the higher number of applications. In 2001-02, it admitted 6,638 out of 10,862 (for an enrollment of 1,517), and its admit rate had been 71% the year prior.
https://www.collegetuitioncompare.com/trends/tulane-university-of-louisiana/admission/
http://www2.tulane.edu/news/releases/archive/2001/a_wave_of_applications.cfm
A surge in applications in 2010-11 took these numbers up to 11,384 admits from 43,815 applicants (enrollment = 1625) which was a competitive admit rate of 26% but a dismal yield of 14%. This year, Tulane looks like it will be admitting ~5,500 for a class of 1,900 from 41,365 applicants - which is the lowest number of admits it has made since 2000, but from an applicant pool four times larger and for a class which is about 400 students larger (or 25% larger).
USC hasn’t seen the same level of application increase as Colby and Tulane between 2001-02 to 2018-19, but it has grown from 26,351 to 67,000. Yet, whereas USC used to admit an average of 8,762 in the past 17 years (low of 7,875, and high of 9395 in 2014-15), the number of admits for this year at ~7500 is also a two-decade low for a class size which is 450 or 15% larger than 2001-02.
https://www.collegetuitioncompare.com/trends/university-of-southern-california/admission/
While these long term trends are interesting in a historical context, current and prospective applicants will need to contend with the simple fact that the number of places being offered seems to be going down in absolute terms at many colleges.
Though a large yield improvement after multiple years seems comprehensible, I think a question remains as to the limits of yield improvement in consecutive years. Maybe I’ve missed something in the figures, but a huge yield change for any school from one year to the next seems yet to be officially recorded (at least for foundational, rather than technical, reasons).