Elon - understanding admit rate - please help

<p>Hi,</p>

<p>I'm trying to understand Elon's admit rate numbers. Their website says last year they had 9000 applications and they admitted about 1200 - that is only about 14%. College Board has them listed as accepting 41%.</p>

<p>Here are their numbers-
Early decision - 452 applications 310 admitted
Early action - 4528 accepted 2521 and 877 attending</p>

<p>If they had 9000 applications that leaves 4020 regular decision applications. I can't tell how many they accepted but less than 100 are attending from this group. If these numbers are right you would really need to apply EA to have a shot.</p>

<p>Can someone explain the math to me? I must be overlooking something....
Thanks</p>

<p>You need to distinguish between those that were offered admission (a high figure) and those that actually enrolled (a low figure). That 1200 figure is an enrollment figure and does not reflect an admit rate. Also, CB is not showing "877" enrollment from early action but instead "577." What the figures tell you is that ELON has a high admit rate and most of those admitted choose to go elsewhere and it gets most of its enrolled students from ED and EA. It also most likely has a high admission rate for regular applicants but even a higher percentage of those choose not to attend ELON.</p>

<p>Sorry - I had the 577 from College Board but I added it (incorrectly) with the ED numbers - which would have made it 887</p>

<p>So if I understand this the 41% means they had about 9000 applications and accepted 3690 and of those 1268 ended up going there which is about 35% of those offered acceptance.</p>

<p>I think that makes sense. The numbers are deceiving when you look at just 9000 and 1250/1268 accepting.</p>

<p>There are two different numbers used when discussing college admissions. </p>

<p>"Acceptance rate" = number accepted/number applying
"Yield" = number attending/number accepted</p>

<p>These numbers are generally inversely proportional - the more students that tend to accept admissions, the fewer they have to accept to achieve a class of the size they want. So, for example, Harvard has a very low acceptance rate, but a very high yield - students accepted tend to go. It looks like Elon has a higher acceptance rate, but a lower yield.</p>

<p>techiemom, you should also take a hard look at the breakdown between regular admission rate and early admission rate. You'll find that Elon is one of those schools that shows a pretty large disparity. Once you take out the EA and ED applicants from the admission numbers, the Regular Decision admission rate drops off quite a bit.</p>