<p>Just as an FYI....</p>
<p>Heard mentioned at Stanford at Parents Weekend a couple weekends ago...</p>
<p>Total number of applicants was around 43,000 and admit rate will drop below 5%</p>
<p>Yikes</p>
<p>Good luck all</p>
<p>I’ll live to see the day the admit rate is <1%.</p>
<p>That’ll be the day.</p>
<p>Wow that’s insane. I guess it’s somewhat expected, but still crazy nonetheless.</p>
<p>If the class of 2018 is the same size as the class of 2017, then for an admission rate of less than 5% means they are expecting their yield rate to go up to 79% from last year’s 76.7. Not an unreasonable assumption since the yield from the previous year was 73%.</p>
<p>43,000*4.99% = 2146
class size of 1694
1694/2146 = 79%</p>
<p>They have to guess on the yield and have to be careful not to under guess or they will have the problem they had in 2012 when 50 more people enrolled than they expected and they had to scramble for housing.</p>
<p>If you look at just the RD pool, looks like the acceptance rate would be about 3.9%
(they accepted 748 out of 6948 applicants)</p>
<p>[-O< [-O< [-O< </p>
<p>Also heard that they are looking over a long term to increase undergraduate enrollment. New undergrad dorm being proposed. Wont be soon enough in time or large enough in quantity to be of much help for those on this forum</p>
<p>These stats really depress me. Hoping for the best, but assuming…</p>
<p>I don’t think it will ever get to anything near 1%. At some point many candidates just won’t go through the work the time and the cost of applying if they feel they have very little chance.</p>
<p>@collegetime18, I don’t see that there really is any reason to be depressed about this. The problem with all of these stats is that people treat college admissions as a true lottery and the worse the percentage, the worse your chances are. I don’t believe that much is chance (some is, but not as much as people seem to feel).</p>
<p>The relevant metric, which we have no idea about, is the relative competitiveness of the pool and how that changes with growing applications.</p>
<p>As an example (extreme examples to make a point and make the math easier)</p>
<p>College A:<br>
Year 1: 30,000 applications, 3k admits, 10% admit rate
Year 2: 60,000 applications, 3k admits, 5 % admit rate </p>
<p>…but of the additional applications are from people whose stats are a lower than the low point of the last year class, weak EC’s etc. And of those 30k new applications only 100 get admitted.</p>
<p>College B:
Year 1: 30,000 applications, 3k admits, 10% admit rate
Year 2: 33,000 applications, 3k admits, 9.1 % admit rate </p>
<p>…but those new 3k applications are a lot higher than the average, great ECs, and of the 3k new, 2k get accepted.</p>
<p>Funny that college B looks like it has a much better chance.</p>
<p>@fluffy2017 thanks so much for that clarification and example. Makes me feel better!</p>
<p>I did not want to post any specific numbers to give Stanford admissions office opportunity to officially announce the application numbers…but, it seems they are not going to release them as other schools have…</p>
<p>…as the OP and others have mentioned the 43,000 or so total applicant numbers mentioned above is correct…and I am afraid the projected overall acceptance rate (whisper number) quoted by some reliable sources is going to be even LOWER than 4.99%…</p>
<p>…because they are expecting a very high yield rate (since more students have Stanford as their preferred choice)… they would rather be a little more conservative accepting fewer students than in past years (as fuffy2017 has pointed out they do not want to over-enroll and have to scramble to find housing for them as they did in 2012)…</p>
<p>To all who have applied…good luck to one and all. Don’t lose hope because you will do well wherever you end up going next fall…</p>
<p>…and as scary as these numbers seem, remember that what is relevant is that this is not a lottery.</p>
<p>If you are a highly qualified candidate, you have (probably) almost just as much as a chance as last year when they had “only” 38,000 applicants, since I doubt that of the 5,000 additional candidates, they are all highly qualified. </p>
<p>The more important issue is the one @gravitas2 mentioned which is that if the yield is a lot higher than the 73% from last year, then fewer highly qualified candidates will be accepted.</p>
<p>I wonder how much, if any, of this is due to a shift away from Wall Street (from Occupy Wall Street efforts and challenges in that industry, the negative view of bankers/mortgage to a glamourazation of tech (facebook, apple, social entrepreneurism, etc.)</p>
<p>BTW, IIRC they released their numbers right after the RD results last year and I think in the fall, they released the yield (once the final class was committed and registered I think).</p>
<p>@fluffy2017. I think you have listed the yield from 2 years ago. Last years was around 77% as you have noted in your earlier response…</p>
<p>…they are having to base their acceptance numbers based on projected 79-81% yield (probably closer to 80%) to be on the safe side…</p>
<p>@gravitas2 - yup, oops on my part. Thanks.</p>
<p>So an 80% yield with a target class size of 1694 gives an acceptance rate of 4.92%</p>
<p>A yield of 82% (a stretch of course, but that was Harvard’s last year) gets it to 4.8%</p>
<p>I wonder how much work they do in trying to predict yield accurately.<br>
What they can do? Perhaps accept more during SCEA? They accepted I think about 23 more than last year, and last year was lower than previous years for some reason. </p>
<p>For example, if they assume 80% but hit 82%, that is an extra 51 people that they have to accommodate.</p>
<p>I think they will have to err on the side of higher yield and accept fewer conservatively…and use the waitlist more efficaciously and judiciously. I don’t believe they have had to use their waitlist in the past few years…</p>