For the incoming Class of 2022, it looks like the lowest acceptance rate ever and the highest yield rate in recent years.
Acceptance rate of 17.7% (ie., 3,610 admits / 20,371 applicants)
Yield rate of 57.3% (ie., 2,070 enrolled / 3,610 admits)
The 2,070 freshmen is slightly up from the 2,050 freshmen enrolled in each of the prior 2 years
Based on an article in the student newspaper back in April, ND had accepted 3,586 students at that time. Looks like a total of 24 students were added to the class off the waitlist.
Most interesting of all: ND is no longer showing the % of the class that are children of alumni. I wonder if the recent Wall Street Journal article in which ND was named as the school with the highest % of legacies caused ND to get nervous about sharing that statistic?
Thanks for posting @GeronimoAlpaca Yes, that is very interesting about the legacy number. I’ll be curious to see if they release it in their annual brochure to applicants or something else.
I also noticed that the mid-50 ACT for enrolled students went back up to 33-35 (after dropping to 32-34 last year).
And they noted “38% in top 1% of their class” vs “43% in top 2% of their class” last year, so they clearly had enough of the 1%-ers this round that it was worth noting this year
@waitingmomla Honestly, I’m actually surprised ND was as open as it was about legacy admissions for all those years. I would guess the ND admissions office has taken notice that public perception has turned negative on legacy admissions, and they probably did not like that Wall Street Journal story either.
I noticed that the ACT scores were back to 33-35 for the enrolled class, and that the SAT scores had crept up just a bit too. I’d missed the fact that they had changed the other stat to be top 1% vs. top 2% so thanks for pointing that out.
FYI, in the past few cycles the test score numbers posted in mid-summer were a tiny bit higher than what the final CDS enrolled class numbers turned out to be a few months later. IIRC last cycle the ACT range was initially reported at 33-35, while the final number was 32-35. That’s s small difference for sure, but might matter to a kid making plans today who has a 33 or 34.
I wonder how these numbers all add up with the statistics published by the schools? The top 1% is roughly 20,000 kids. ND got almost 1000 of them alone. I have a feeling when you add up all the other top schools it’s going to add up to way more then 20k.
ND’s Don Bishop from 2016. Although ND’s stats would have creeped up a bit since then, so have the stats at every other top 20 school since then as well. They all get harder to get into year over year. So this is probably still pretty accurate on a relative basis.
Check out the slide at 5:30.
Bishop says there are 50k HS seniors each year who are top 1% in test scores OR top 1% in grades. The top 15 schools enroll 25k kids. And 1/3 of the kids in the top 15 schools are below the top 1% for a variety of reasons – athletes, legacies, URMs, etc. etc. etc.
So only about 16k of those 50k kids 1% kids (which is probably more like 1.5-2% of HS seniors) get admitted into the top 15. ND probably gets about the same share of these kids as do other schools with similar rankings.
USNWR rankings calculate a “selectivity index” which is a combination of grades, test scores and admit rate. Last year ND was ranked #18 overall, but its SI was higher at #15. WUSTL was the same as ND. Cornell was 14 overall and 15 SI. Duke was 8 and 15 SI.
Vandy and Brown were 14 overall and 11 SI. NWU was 11 and 11. CalTech and UChi are tied for being the most selective school. Harvard is 3; YPS, Penn and JHU all tied for 6.
USNWR comes out with it newest rankings in mid-September. But the rankings based on the 2018 entering class data wouldn’t come out until Fall 2019.
Actually my number was off but still 50K is too high, they do say 1% of there class which is definitely a GPA thing not a score thing. High school grads number 3.5 million in 2017 leaving 35K in the top 1%. Top 15 doesn’t even include the big universities like UCB/UM/UVA/UCLA that get there fair share of the top 1%. I just think that everyone has some serious rounding issues.
2019 U.S. News Best Colleges Rankings Coming Sept. 10
The new U.S. News rankings will highlight the top schools in the nation, from smaller private universities to larger public colleges.
@CU123 The ND article in post #4 noted – “Academically, nearly 40 percent of students with class rank information finished in the top 1 percent of their class during high school…” In the youtube link Northwesty references above, Don Bishop says only 42% of ND applicants in 2016 came from high schools that reported class rank. For the other 58% of kids, the high schools provided some information that helped “approximate” rank. I’m not sure if there’s any way to know the true one-percenters at ND or any school.
Also, I believe Don said about 1/3 of the one-percenters ND accepts do end up taking the “free tuition/honors college deal” at their state flagship. He doesn’t say where/how he gets the figure, so FWIW.
Most schools don’t do class rank anymore. Most merely provide non-individualized information on their own grading system and grade distributions. Plus, each school does its own review/score of the HS transcript. So it is impossible for any top school to give any truly hard grade/GPA/class rank data in the same way that they can with standardized test scores. So ND might be saying that 40% of the 42% with rank were top 1% on grades. So 17% of the enrolled class. Or maybe they mean something else.
The real point is that however you measure the top 1% or so of HS grads, there’s a surplus of such students available to the top tier schools like ND. Bishop says the top 15 USNWR schools enroll 25k students, and only about two thirds of those spots get filled by 1%-ers (however measured). So there’s 16k top 15 seats for 35-50k kids.
ND (if it wanted to) could fill 100% of their seats with 1% kids, and there would still be plenty of other 1%-ers left over for all the other top tier schools to do the same thing.
To any fellow Class of 2023 applicants, just a few other items that you might want to make note of…
I recently visited ND and attended the information session and the campus tour. When I checked in at the admissions office, the staff member at the front desk passed out several brochures (and a nice little notepad and tote bag!) On one brochure, it showed that the middle-50% test score range for the class that just got admitted was 1430-1540 on the SAT, and 33-35 on the ACT. I noticed that the SAT range shown on the brochure was higher than the range shown on the ND Admissions Stats website. This is because the Admissions Stats website shows enrolled students, whereas the brochure was for all admitted students last year regardless of whether or not they ended up attending ND.
According to an earlier story on a local TV station (link below), the median SAT for the incoming class was 1490, and the median ACT was 34, so applicants without a special talent or hook should probably be around these numbers.
The other thing is that this year’s incoming class is 22% children of alumni (“legacies”) as opposed to 24% children of alumni for the previous year’s class. This years class was 80% Catholic, although the admissions rep said it didn’t matter if you were Catholic or not, just that you understood the importance of faith at a place like Notre Dame.
Oh, and most important, the ND admissions rep said that ND will be super-scoring the ACT this year.
Good luck to everyone with the application process this fall. This is going to be an intense start to senior year.
“Oh, and most important, the ND admissions rep said that ND will be super-scoring the ACT this year.”
Most of ND’s peers in the USNWR rankings don’t super-score the ACT; they typically only super-score the SAT. FYI, Duke, Hopkins and WUSTL are the other ACT super-scorers in the 10-20ish range.
Whether a school super-scores or not shouldn’t really change admission decisions very much between any given year’s applicants. Since all applicants are treated the same way. But it could give a little boost to the school’s reported test scores for ranking purposes.
So I’d take that policy change as a little bit of a “tell” that ND continues to value high reportable test scores a little bit more in its admissions decisions (even though everything counts since admissions are holistic). So all things being equal, ND applicants might want to think about taking the ACT one more time…
I agree with everything that @northwesty stated above. In fact, I would go a step further and say that I believe that schools like Rice, WashU in St. Louis, Vanderbilt, and Notre Dame – all of which have historically been pretty tightly clustered in the US News rankings – all over-emphasize standardized test scores. Test scores are the easiest way to get a slight boost in Selectivity ranking to help make up for the lower score on the academic peer survey score in the US News rankings.
@GeronimoAlpaca - the interesting stat from your link - 53% of enrolled students were involved in music, drama, fine arts or dance. I have no context to compare that to other schools, but more than half of enrolled. A lesson to potential applicants?
@GeronimoAlpaca I wouldn’t place too much importance on ND not publishing stats on legacies since it makes no effort to hide the fact that it does give preference to members of the “Notre Dame family”. The admissions officer admitted this in our meeting saying that a “strong candidate from an ND family would get an extra look”. He went on to say that ND was “proud” to have so many students whose parents, grandparents and siblings went there. For what it is worth, admissions officers at University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth and Harvard said almost precisely the same thing though ND and Penn are the two that actually emphasized legacies.
@northwesty Good afternoon. I’m currently a sophomore in High School and I was quite interested in seeing whether or not if as of right now, I would be on the right track into getting into Notre Dame solely based on my stats and ECs up until this point in time. I would gladly appreciate if I could get some feedback or any potential advice on how to further enhance my application in the coming years of High School. As a side note, I’m planning on majoring in Biochemistry in which I’ll be taking AP Bio Junior year and AP Chem Senior year.
Freshmen Year: 4.43 GPA, 2 Honors classes (Math and English), AP Span Lang, Physics (Only AP, no honors offered yet it technically is at my school since it’s as difficult as AP)
Sophomore Year (As of right now): 4.6 GPA, 2 Honors classes (Math and English), AP World History and AP Spanish Literature (Not able to take a science this year which is agonizing due to my major yet my electives express my passion in certain areas in which they take up my schedule. However, I’ll be taking AP Bio next year and AP Chem Senior year which all works out
As for ECs: Jazz Band, Symphonic Band (1st chair Alto Saxophone), Cross Country (JV), Tennis (Varsity), Chess Club (Vice President), Math Club, Science Olympiad (Gold Team), HYLC (Hispanic Youth Leaders Council), HOSA (Health Occupants of America), Key Club.
Once again, I would gladly appreciate if I could get some feedback. Also, I’m studying rigorously right now and preparing for the SAT for I know that the applicant pool is beyond competitive and I’m aiming (or dreaming I should say) for a 1540+. Thanks!
Side note: (Would the admissions officers be that concerned if I didn’t take a science sophomore year due to my electives yet still did the most rigorous course load possible at my school? And since my major is Biochemistry and as long as I took AP Bio and AP Chem? For Junior and Senior Year? Thanks once again!)