College Admissions Statistics Class of 2023

Applying to College
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Details on Brown…

Headline 4.8% RD and 6.6% overall off a 9% increase in applications.

“Brown received 38,674 applications for the Class of 2023, which constitutes a 9 percent increase over last year. This is the largest application pool in the University’s history. Brown will make 1,784 Regular Decision offers of admission to the incoming Class of 2023, in addition to the 769 Early Decision admission offers made in December. The overall admit rate for this year’s pool is 6.6 percent. The Regular Decision admit rate is 4.8 percent.”

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@SJ2727 “For the first type ED is definitely an advantage, for the second it may be a “waste” of an option.”

This is purely anecdotal but I know many academically outstanding students who were not legacies or recruited athletes who were admitted ED to various universities. Similar students applying RD had a harder time (although many still did well). If a full-pay all-around very academically strong student lacks a specific “hook”, I think there are many very selective universities where an ED application will increase their chances. (But not EA). I have absolutely no scientific evidence that is true, and many very strong students will still get in RD. But I don’t think it is a “waste” for a very strong student with very high stats to apply ED and increase their chances over RD.

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@observer12 , ok, I’m just saying (again anecdotallly) from CC many here say that the advantage is not as big as it is made out to be (some have proposed numbers showing say half the ED admits are hooked at top schools). I don’t really know the numbers and I don’t know if anyone does outside the colleges themselves tbh, and anyway some of those legacies may be brilliant too, etc. There seems a lot of hate for ED on CC, but I agree with you that for the unhooked applicant it’s often an advantage (and you don’t need to be full pay to take advantage of it either, I’ve seen some very nice grants awarded to ED students).

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Of course! It’s a huge boost at some colleges. But it would be much more fair to know if your ED application really gives you odds of ED 25% instead of RD 10% or if the real number for unconnecteds is closer to ED 12%.

IMO colleges can do what they want in terms of legacy, sports or whatever. But being transparent about what the numbers REALLY look like is just fair when you are asking students to commit.

JMO

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Brown’s RD numbers don’t quite add up.

Total: 2,553 accepts of 38,674 (6.6%) - that checks out
ED: 769 of 4,230 (18.17%) - announced in December

Subtract the two and you get
RD: 1,784 accepts out of 34,444 - 5.2% instead of the announced 4.8%

I wonder if the discrepancy comes from kids who were deferred ED and then accepted RD - and those kids aren’t captured as RD admits, but weren’t part of the ED accepts announced earlier.

That would be about 131 applicants, which seems like a reasonable number of deferred ED applicants to ultimately get in.

126

Interesting article about private high schools admissions today, just to compare selectivity with college admissions.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-27/at-50-000-a-year-baby-ivies-road-to-yale-starts-at-age-5

The article says Trinity School (New York City) has 60 or so kindergarten spots. On the topic of how many real spots there are for grabs, after taking out spots for siblings (strong sibling policy) and legacies, the number of places for an unhooked kid is somewhere in the 15-25 range!

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@SJ2727

Yes, we are probably saying the same thing.

I actually posted not to debate the advantages of ED and who it goes to, but because I believe colleges should be very transparent about their ED admit rates and how much of the class is filled with students who apply ED 1 and ED 2. Just seeing a very low total admit rate is not being transparent. You are correct that just knowing that Hopkins 31% ED admit rate or Middlebury’s 45% ED admit rate is high doesn’t tell an applicant how many legacies or athletes are included. But it seems far more helpful than not seeing University of Chicago’s ED1 and ED 2 admit rates at all. (I don’t mean to single out Chicago which is a fantastic college but I think it could be more transparent like Hopkins, Brown, Dartmouth, etc.) and I’m not sure why it would not be.

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@baltimoreguy The stats on Brown were sent in a letter to college counselors.

"I am writing to inform you that Regular Decision admission decisions will be posted Thursday, March 28th at 7:00 p.m. EDT and can be viewed through the applicant’s Brown Account Portal. Applicants received an email on March 14th outlining the date and time, including a link to the Brown Applicant Portal.

Brown received 38,674 applications for the Class of 2023, which constitutes a 9 percent increase over last year. This is the largest application pool in the University’s history. Brown will make 1,784 Regular Decision offers of admission to the incoming Class of 2023, in addition to the 769 Early Decision admission offers made in December. The overall admit rate for this year’s pool is 6.6 percent. The Regular Decision admit rate is 4.8 percent. More than 60 percent of the Class of 2023 students admitted through Regular Decision have applied to receive financial aid. Brown meets 100 percent of demonstrated financial need for all admitted undergraduates, and 43 percent of the University’s undergraduate student body currently receives need-based financial aid.

Additionally, 14 percent of accepted students represent the first generation in their family to attend college. 49 percent are students of color, defined as those who self-identify as African American, Latinx, Native American, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander or Asian.

The students accepted from the Regular Decision applicant pool come from 68 nations, 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. The top countries represented outside the United States are China, Canada, India, South Korea and the United Kingdom.

Of the 2,641 applicants to the Program in Liberal Medical Education (PLME), 94 students were admitted with a 4 percent admission rate. Of the 694 applicants to the Brown-RISD Dual Degree Program, 18 students were admitted with a 3 percent admission rate.

If spaces in our entering class are available after the May 1 Common Reply Date, we will be pleased to make additional admission offers to students on our Wait List. Please note, however, that all spaces for both the Program in Liberal Medical Education and the Brown-RISD Dual Degree Program have already been filled. The number of students admitted from the Wait List will depend on how many students accept our initial admission offers by May 1. In recent years, the number of Wait List spaces available in an incoming class has ranged from 60 to 120. We will conclude Wait List activity by June 30. For more information on the Wait List click here.

In April, Brown will hold two admitted student weekends and one day event offering admitted students the opportunity to experience Brown firsthand before making their decision. All event details can be found here.

We remain deeply grateful to you for your continuing wisdom and counsel throughout the year."

129

chicago is at the cutting edge of gaming the system. I’m sure there’s a reason not to release the numbers, like if most of the class comes from ED that may discourage future students from wasting their application fee on Chicago during RD. Let’s say chicago turns away kids in EA with better stats than those with ED. They may not want people to know they are juicing their yield numbers at the expense of denying EA kids for example.

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Literally, by collecting their application fees!

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I’m not a counselor, and my D withdrew her app back in December, so my email was probably a mistake. No harm though!

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Middlebury - 16% overall admit rate (ED1, ED2 and RD)

http://www.middlebury.edu/newsroom/archive/2019-news/node/616574

Middlebury had announced 297 admits for ED1 out of 654, and 8824 RD applicants.
So this implies 75 admits for ED2 out of (9750-9478)=272 ED2 apps.

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Unless and until the colleges release detailed information on their applicant pools by various stratifications, admit rates mean very little. Admit rates help colleges create an illusion of selectivity, but tell applicants very little about their chances of admission for their specific cohorts.

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@1NJParent I’d argue the opposite. Most of the apps are coming from academic excellent but unhooked kids. their admission rate is probably worse than the total rate since at least half the seats are already filled with institutional needs. If anything the real rate is probably even worse than it appears, but the main goals of colleges are increasing applications and increasing yield . All schools target those features, some harder than others (anyone with an ED2 for example is targeting yield - since the timing of ED2 still forces kids to apply to all the RD deadlines; at least with ED1 in theory those kids don’t have to apply anywhere RD if accepted)

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Many schools release enough for us to work it out, e.g., Middlebury and Colorado College. Some are particularly secretive.

An earlier post mentioned Chicago. The VP of enrollment / dean of admissions was paid $588,000 in 2016 and $407,000 in 2012 (these are available from Chicago’s Form 990). Ridiculous amounts for a dean of admissions. But I guess the increased applications earn enough fees to cover both the total cost and his increased pay.

The ethics and strategy seem a little questionable. To the extent the compensation is tied to his performance as measured by getting more applications in the door (so that the admit rate looks better), there would seem to be a financial conflict of interest between him and the applicants. Chicago also plays around with admissions plans to get its statistics up, recently introducing ED1 and ED2 but keeping EA to keep the number of applications high.

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If you apply to UChicago and ask for ANY FA there is no application fee, so there goes that idea, unless you think those who are full pay are getting ripped off by that particular fee. :confused: : Personally I do see why some schools don’t give out these numbers. What good does it do for them? Nothing, nada, that is why Stanford is no longer releasing numbers of apps vs admits.

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Stanford and Harvard statistics are arguably no longer informative. Harvard yield has 80% with a standard deviation of less than 2% for the last two decades and it has been making 2050 offers with a std dev of about 50 for a class size of 1660.

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Anyone with ED2 also has ED1 which students can apply to though… no-one is resticted to applying ED2 only.

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@bronze2 “Stanford and Harvard statistics are arguably no longer informative”

Others may disagree, but I think it is less important to have transparency about EA admissions than ED. University of Michigan admits EA and I don’t think it matters that much how that admit rate differs than RD.

Both Stanford and Harvard have recruited athletes and legacy admits and they still use EA and not ED. I assume there is an institutional choice for a university to admit ED versus EA because that commitment of knowing a seat is definitely filled is important to them and gives a boost to non-hooked applicants who might not be noticed in the RD pile among tens of thousands others with similar stats.

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Bottom line on all of this is that for an unhooked student applying to Stanford or Harvard seems to be an effort in fruitlessness. The rates for the unhooked is getting down below 1%. Having said that both schools are not interested in having students give up on them and that is definitely one of the reasons Stanford will no longer publish admit rates.