Stanford Accepts 7.1% 1st-Year Students

College Search & Selection
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<p>By Janet Lorin
March 30 (Bloomberg) -- Stanford University admitted the smallest percentage of first-year undergraduate students in its history as applications jumped to record highs at selective colleges, including the Ivy League.
Stanford accepted 2,427 students, or 7.1 percent of the
34,348 applicants for the 2011-2012 school year, Bob Patterson, director of admission for the university near Palo Alto, California, said yesterday in an interview. The number of applications increased 6.8 percent from last year for the university, the third-wealthiest in the U.S. with an endowment valued at $13.8 billion as of Aug. 31.
Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, also received record numbers of applications and plan to release admissions decisions today. While applying to selective colleges is “daunting” for students because of the low admission rates, they shouldn’t seek a spot at Stanford just for vanity’s sake, Patterson said.
“Students are applying to more and more institutions and they can ultimately choose one,” Patterson said in an interview. “We don’t want students who are just applying to see if they can get admitted.”
Stanford offered admission to 50 more first-year students than last year because of increased dormitory and classroom space, Patterson said. It cost $55,385 to attend Stanford in the current 2010-11 academic year.
Almost 35,000 students applied to Harvard, an increase of
15 percent, William Fitzsimmons, dean of undergraduate admissions and financial aid, said in January. The institution admitted 6.9 percent of its applicants last year. Harvard, the richest U.S. university with an endowment valued at $27.4 billion as of June 30, and Yale are members of the eight Ivy League colleges in the northeastern U.S.
Stanford, which opened in 1891, counts among its alumni Herbert Hoover, the 31st U.S. president; Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google Inc., based in Mountain View, California; and Stephen Breyer and Anthony Kennedy , U.S.
Supreme Court associate justices.</p>