Why Princeton is no longer promoting its admission rate

I didn’t see this anywhere on this site.

The Admission Office’s goal is to admit a diverse and dynamic group of students. We think about how students will interact with one another in the classroom and on the field, in the music practice room, and the residential college common room. We discuss how students might approach difficult circumstances, how they would interact with people with different perspectives, and how they might approach the University’s informal motto about the service of humanity. To do this, we read and discuss the essays, the letters of recommendation, interview write-ups, and any other pieces that have been shared with us.

It isn’t just about grades and test scores.

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That is in part because Princeton has literally thousands of applicants with perfect, or near-perfect, grades and scores to choose among. Those are no longer distinguishing factors.

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Maybe they are concerned that they can’t keep the acceptance rates as low as they were this year over time (because number of applications isn’t likely to be higher than this year)?

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This is the new BS from elite college admissions. They are now above such trivialities as touting their exclusivity. And it’s all for the good of the children…

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Stanford stopped doing this about three or four years ago, if I recall. Do HYPSM really need to compete with one another to see who can get to 0% first? At what point does it no longer matter? I’d say all those schools have now reached that point.

Paywall, but this opinion piece is amusing. By Frank Bruni. You don’t need to read it to get the gist.

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Regardless of their motives, it’s a better outcome.

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Here’s a response from some of the editors of The Princetonian:

I think these colleges should boycott the rankings. It’s ridiculous for many of them to be told by the “experts” how to become a better college.

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The deeply cynical part of me says it’s not about becoming a better college, but about the colleges ensuring they have the highest rankings to increase “selectivity” and, therefore, ultimately cash.

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Yes, I should have put quotation marks on that too

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It’s humorous to see what they decide to promote and not promote. Now, front and center, is the 68% person of color designation of the admitted class.

Do you have a cite for this? Thanks.

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Revenue from undergrad fees is irrelevant to these schools, single digits of percentages for sure. This is all about public image to offset the hundreds of millions from research and medical revenues. If it was about money and fundraising, they would still be giving legacy a lot of consideration. Our experience this year was that, if anything, legacies at schools of this type were seen this year as perpetuating privilege, and being a legacy or from an independent private school a nonfactor at best, if not an outright negative. Yale, for example, in its collage of results prints first-gen students immediately next to legacy students to show they don’t quite honor privilege… any more…

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i dont have any ties to princeton - only know the kid around the corner who plays a sport there - but when reading that first article, my first response was that it all sounded sort of . . . . creepy . . . scifi . . . . masterminding and controlling and picking and choosing what they think is the perfect class according to their omniscient determinations. Ok, that’s probably a little strong, but it seems they really are controlling what personalities get in or not, and so i’ll just go back to . . . creepy.

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Note that I specifically did NOT mention the source of the cash. Never even referred to it.

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This link is for the class of 2025, not 2026. However given that it is class of 2025, we can also compare to the CDS for that year at https://registrar.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf136/files/documents/CDS_2021_2022.pdf . Using federal definitions, the CDS reports:

White – 484/1129 = 43%
Asian – 273/1129 = 24%
Hispanic – 148/1129 = 13%
Black – 102/1129 = 9%
2+ Races – 95/1129 = 8%
Unknown – 26/1129 = 2%
Other – 3/1129 ~= 0%

Assuming 2+ races are counted as “people of color”, and unknown are not, then the total is 54% people of color. Hispanic + Black + Native American is a much smaller 22%.

The previously linked Class of 2025 admit page reports a much larger 68% “people of color”. Yield differences could contribute since one list is admits and the other is enrolled. They also may be using some creative accounting. For example, several colleges double count students of multiple races in internal publications.

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Are you referring to this passage?

“We think about how students will interact with one another in the classroom and on the field, in the music practice room, and the residential college common room. We discuss how students might approach difficult circumstances, how they would interact with people with different perspectives, and how they might approach the University’s informal motto about the service of humanity.”

I’m trying to understand how this is creepy.

The university is opening a couple of new residential colleges next fall and thus expanding the size of the student body. So the Class of 2026 will be larger than its predecessors, and unless the number of applicants increased to a similar degree, I expect that the acceptance rate will be higher this year than last year.

Incidentally, I find the university’s withholding admission stats rather pointless given that each year’s acceptance rate will eventually appear in the Common Data Set.

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Publishing an extraordinarily low admission rate might ultimately discourage people from applying. While selectivity is sought after, it may be self-limiting. Better not to mention it if you want applications to keep increasing!