Northwestern's acceptance rate unusually low?

<p>college prow ler says northwestern's acceptance rate is 27% but in the decisions letter, it says northwestern only accepted 2000/32000 applicants... isn't that only 6.25%?</p>

<p>From what I read from someone else’s post (which was a quote directly from an article), NU’s acceptance rate dropped to 18%. This means they accepted around 5760 applicants, and then 2000 were enrolled.</p>

<p>EDIT: Here –> <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/northwestern-university/1114541-nu-overall-acceptance-rate-18-down-27-just-2-years-ago.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/northwestern-university/1114541-nu-overall-acceptance-rate-18-down-27-just-2-years-ago.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>They didn’t accept 2000…their freshman class will be about 2000, so they’ll accept about 5000 knowing that around 3000 will go somewhere else</p>

<p>The 18% acceptance rate was for last year’s class (FINALLY updated on College Board). This year’s will be even lower.</p>

<p>The yield for the 40% accepted ED will be ~100%. The yield for the remaining 60% will be lower (maybe nearer the traditional 40%?) so they will admit a proportionally higher number to fill the remaining RD slots.</p>

<p>I applied to NU, thinking the acceptance rate was roughly 25% the last few years, with yield in the 30s - my counselor told me that NU would be a REACH school, which I didn’t quite get with a 3.85 GPA, no rank, SAT 2200+, SAT IIs 750-800s, 3-sport varsity athlete (nationally-ranked in one), AP & National Merit scholar, strong ECs, etc.</p>

<p>I also didn’t know at app time that NU EDs would be in the 40% acceptance range. </p>

<p>With 32,000 applying & % acceptance rate in the teens @NU, I guess it really is a REACH school for many RD applicants. </p>

<p>And the pressure continues for the next round of HS seniors…</p>

<p>The ED acceptance rate is higher than RD (as is true for ALL schools with early admission programs), but the stats of admitted ED students are virtually identical to those of RD students. A higher % of ED applicants are academically qualified.</p>

<p>I did the calculations, their new acceptance rate should be about 13~15%. They usually have a 33% yield rate, and they accepted ~800/~2400 students ED (source: [Applications</a> Hit New High : Northwestern University Newscenter](<a href=“http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2012/01/applications-new-high.html]Applications”>Applications Hit New High - Northwestern Now)), thus they only need to fill out 1200 RD. Thus, based on their yield rate, they have to accept about ~3600 RD kids. Based on both regular and early admission, their acceptance has most likely fallen a good amount.</p>

<p>Also, the administration is now looking to accept more ED kids, because they want a lot more people who have NU as their first choice (driving retention up and RD acceptance down). That and I also heard a rumor that NU was looking to reduce the class size this year because of something (assuming renovations and such)–this is just a rumor though, so who knows…</p>

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<p>I doubt that’s a consideration since NUs historic retention tops 97%. ;-D </p>

<p>There have been articles posted saying they plan to admit slightly fewer freshmen this year in part due to an above-average freshman class size last year (due to unexpectedly high yield) and a desire to return to more normal number of admitted transfers this year versus last.</p>