<p>Applications for the Class of 2011 were double that of prior few years - 10,000</p>
<p>Wow. Very interesting. I think they had 5400 applicants last year. </p>
<p>Do you think inclusion in Newsweek's "New Ivies" had anything to do with this? Maybe the super-easy candidates choice application?</p>
<p>How do the admissions folks resond to this increase? Will they be more selective in their acceptances? Accept more humanities majors? More girls? Will they accept about the same number of students as in previous years or expect their yield to drop and accept more? Will they misjudge their yield and over-enroll?</p>
<p>(I was wondering if this would change their USNews ranking, but acceptance rate is only 1.5 percent of the total score, so probably not much.)</p>
<p>I think the article definitely had something to do with the increase.</p>
<p>However the big question is how the quality of the applicant pool changed. If the bulk of the additional applicants represented the bottom 1/3rd of the applicants the increase would not make a huge difference in the quality of the admittees.</p>
<p>On the other hand, if the additional applicants were just of the same quality of those in the first part of the applicant pool then RPI should be able to admit more students with SATs higher than the current average (1320, old SAT).
They were already with 15-20 points of places like UC Berkeley and G Tech so even a small increase may allow RPI to surpass them and put the class of 2011 very close to Cornell and other Ivies.
Kudos to Newsweek for giviing world class universities like Rensselaer, CMU, Rice and Tufts the exposure that they have deserved for a long time.</p>