"Yale University has received a record number of applications for the fourth year in a row, with 36,829 high school students seeking one of about 1,570 spots in the class of 2023, according to Admissions Office spokesman Mark Dunn.
The number is 4.3 percent higher than last year’s record of 35,305 applicants, which was itself 7.3 percent larger than in 2017, according to figures supplied by Dunn." …
Actually, Yale will probably accept about 2,250 (last year 2,229, year before 2,272) to build a class of 1,570, or about a 6.1% overall admissions rate.
If the press releases have been correct: 6,016 applied SCEA, 56% of those deferred (3,369) and 794 accepted, so 1,853 rejected so far. That means RD round has 34,182 students (36,829 total apps minus 794 accepted minus 1,853 rejected). Using @bksquared’s number of 2,250 estimated total acceptances, RD acceptance rate will be about 4.3%. (1,456 projected RD acceptances (2,250 minus 794) divided by 34,182). Every year I wonder how much lower can things go? It reminds me of Frank Bruni’s satire article of a few years ago https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/30/opinion/college-admissions-shocker.html?_r=1
It will keep on dropping as long as the number of delusional kids who “have always dreamed of going to Yale” but don’t have the stats, or do have the stats and think that, just because their stats are above average for Yale accepted students that Yale is a match, keeps on increasing.
The more kids want to go, the more “prestigious” it gets because it’s difficult to get into, the more students will keep on applying. Tis a positive feedback loop, and will keep on going until the system collapses. This will likely happen when the number of applications is too large for them to be handled by regular staff, and their “holistic” system falls apart, or when the actual acceptance criteria become common knowledge, and 50% of all applicants realize that they have no chance, despite stellar stats and ECs.
Either that, or when people start having a basic understanding of statistics, which means sometime in the next millennium. Maybe.
As one of Yale’s obscurer Profs, Aristotle (Yogi) Berra, Ph.D., once theorized: “When a school attains a given level of popularity no one will any longer go to it.”
The reality is, the true admission rate for unhooked kids at places like Yale is so low, it’s probably not even worth applying no matter what kind of stats you have. I mean, if you look at Naviance and see that not a single kid from you high school has gotten into Yale (or Harvard, Stanford etc …) in the past ten years, what does that tell you? I actually think that a lot of high stat kids have figured this out already, but obviously not enough to lower the number of applications, at least not yet.