<p>Last year it was ~7%, 2007 was ~9%. This year, once again, there is a record number of applicants. Will the acceptance rate drop by yet another 2 percentage points?</p>
<p>Also accepting speculation on Yale and Princeton: Last year Yale was ~8%, and I'm not sure about Princeton but I think it was ~9%. In 2007 they were both ~9%.</p>
<p>I think it'll be just below 7% (6.8%-ish)</p>
<p>^ Go to her thread on the Yale forum. The article posted in response (probably) correctly predicts around 7.3%</p>
<p>7.3% for Yale. Harvard's is definitely going to be quite a bit (read: >1%) lower than that since last year Harvard had 7.2%.</p>
<p>^ I was under the impression they’d be around the same…Wasn’t Harvard looking to restart the construction of new houses?</p>
<p>I might be imagining I read that.</p>
<p>New houses? I haven’t heard of any new houses… -goes to check Wikipedia page- Hopefully, there will be new houses. That means better admissions chances for you and me, lol :).</p>
<p>I’m saying anything below 7% myself too.</p>
<p>These new financial aid policies really draw out the applicants, do they?</p>
<p>No need to wonder. You can estimate it pretty accurately right now. Harvard always accepts somethng very close to 2000 applicants. So the variability in the Harvard admission precentage is driven year to year mostly by the number of applicants, which we already know this year is about 29,000.</p>
<p>2000/29,000 x 100% = 6.9%</p>
<p>It will be something close to that.</p>
<p>Coureur’s about right. It was only 1948 accepted last year, and all that’s been released is that this years apps were “over 29,000,” so it may be 6.7% or lower.</p>
<p>At some point, won’t they just be missing out on being able to educate applicants?</p>
<p>I mean, where do you draw the line and say “Yes, this much selectivity has guaranteed THESE are the best possible applicants”?</p>
<p>^ You don’t need the absolute best applicants, and they’re not trying to find the absolute best applicants. They just want to create a simultaneously great and diverse class. When you get to schools/applicants of HYP caliber, you don’t even need to choose the absolute bests to have extraordinary people.</p>
<p>Ex: Even the second-best kid at physics or something is still very impressive.</p>
<p>
This happens at any selectivity level lower than 100%. You’ll always be missing out on educating some people.</p>
<p>^ No, I mean when they say a large portion of applicants are qualified…HOW can ONLY about 2,000 be so interesting as people they ONLY they are deemed worthy of acceptance?</p>
<p>It just doesn’t seem to me that there is such a great potential for personal diversity that a Harvard class of 2,000 admits would be different from a Harvard class of 3,000 admits, save the size.</p>
<p>^Size is a larger issue than you think it is. 2000 versus 3000 is quite a big difference.</p>
<p>I know it’s a large number of people, but really, HOW different will those people be?</p>
<p>I know that’s the reason you can’t just consider objective stats; you would have to arbitrate in silly ways to determine who got in…</p>
<p>But at the same time, HOW does admitting only 2,000 instead of 3,000 preserve some intangible called “diversity”, I mean, really, what do those 2,000 applicants have that another 1,000 don’t?</p>
<p>Esp when you have tens of thousands of people applying!</p>
<p>I think it’s just a size issue; Harvard couldn’t accommodate as many people as, say, PSU, even if there were as many people of precisely the same caliber(in obj/subj) as the 2000 it currently admits.</p>
<p>I think that’s why Yale is going ahead with building new RCs</p>
<p>re: new RCS: remember that Yale is already smaller than Harvard. (5250 vs. 6650)</p>
<p>Also consider that if you added 1000 students to every Harvard Class, the total undergraduate student population might exceed 10,000. The cost of accommodating 4,000 more people in Cambridge >> the cost of two new buildings in New Haven.</p>
<p>Going from 2000 to 3000 would mean increasing the size of the college from 6700 to 10,000, which would make a huge change in the culture of the school. All frosh (well, >90%) could no longer live together on the Old Yard, and it would take another six residential houses to accommodate that number of students - they’d have to be on the other side of the river, and even then I doubt you could find enough room to manage it.</p>
<p>Anyway, if the size of Harvard’s entering class is a worry to you, be sure to apply somewhere else. And of course you should be applying somewhere else any time you are applying to a super-reach college like Harvard. First find a great safety college to apply to, and then build up your list of “reach” colleges. </p>
<p>Good luck to all of you waiting for news on the last round of admission decisions this year.</p>
<p>^ Oh, I’ve done so.</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>If anyone didn’t apply anywhere but Harvard, they would either be extremely arrogant or their parents would have to have donated squillions of dollars… lol :).</p>
<p>How large, exactly, should one’s list of “reach” colleges be? I’ve just added every college I might have an interest of attending in the future.</p>
<p>You should apply to squillions of them. lol.</p>
<p>I dunno, presumably as many as you ‘might’ be interested in attending.</p>