With no early applicants, U. will draw heavily on waitlist

With the elimination of Early Decision for the Class of 2012, the University is entering uncharted territory as it reviews this year's batch of applicants.

The Admission Office has seen rapid growth in the number of regular decision candidates in recent times, with the applicant pool growing from 13,000 to almost 19,000 over the past four years. Previous years saw almost 2,500 students apply early to the University, and most Princeton hopefuls who would have chosen that option this year will undoubtedly join the regular decision pool instead.

The Admission Office now needs to deal with all those applications during the already busy months of January through March.

Now that early admissions has been dropped, one pressing logistical question concerns the number of students who need to be admitted through the regular decision process to fill the Class of 2012, Dean of Admission Janet Rapelye said. Since the University has traditionally admitted about half of its freshman class during the Early Decision round — when candidates are required to attend the University if accepted — Rapelye admitted that it would be difficult for her office to judge how many accepted students would matriculate at the University this year.

"There is no question that the admit rate will go up and the yield will go down," she said. Last year, applicants were admitted at an all-time low rate of 9.5 percent, while the yield — the number of accepted students who matriculated at the University — was just under 70 percent.

Rapelye added that, because of this year's uncertainty about expected yield, her office will initially admit a "conservative" number of students and then possibly take "several hundred students off the wait list."

In past years, the University has taken a very limited number of students from the waitlist, with 47 students accepted from the list last year and none for the Class of 2009. "It doesn't matter whether they are admitted in regular decision or off of the waitlist," Rapelye said. "In the end, they are still admitted to Princeton — that's what counts."

With the prospect of an increased admit rate and decreased yield, the University may jeopardize its number-one spot in U.S. News and World Report's annual ranking of the top schools in the nation, since the magazine uses both criteria in drawing up its list.

But Rapelye said the University should not be concerned about a possible slide in its U.S. News ranking. "There isn't a school in a stronger position than Princeton to be able to stand up and say [that] we are not going to judge ourselves on this artificial standard by which the outside world judges us," she said. "What do we gain by competing in the race for the lowest admit rate?"

A new strategy for applicants

The acceptance rate for Early Decision candidates has always been significantly higher than for Regular Decision, which has prompted some applicants to apply early to the University even if they don't have a clear first-choice school. "I see many students stressed because of pressure that they need to apply ED even if they are not sure about their first choice," said Sarah Williams, a college counselor at the Hun School of Princeton. "Students feel like they are not going to have a shot unless they apply early."

But, by dropping Early Decision, Rapelye said she hoped to discourage these kinds of calculations. "My concern about Early Decision over the past few years has been that students were not using it for their first choice," she said. "They were using it as a strategy."

Since Princeton and Harvard are the only Ivy League schools to have dropped their early admissions programs, it's possible that high school seniors aiming for the security of early acceptance will focus on other schools. But Rapelye said she is willing to accept this risk. "We literally had 10,000 students in our pool last year of almost 19,000 students who were qualified to be here, at the highest level," she said. "So what if some of them decide to go early somewhere else? We will still have thousands more from which to choose."

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Rapelye encouraged candidates who genuinely want to attend Princeton and consider it their first choice to say so in their applications, since they won't have a chance to show their eagerness by applying early.

But Christopher Avery, a Harvard professor who coauthored "The Early Admissions Game," said such declarations won't carry the same weight as an early application. He suggests that students have their college counselors convey their interest in their first-choice school, since admission officers are likely to trust the counselors' statements more than the applicants'.

Harvard and the University of Virginia, both of which also dropped their early admission programs over the last year, will face some of the same challenges as Princeton. To publicize their schools' application and financial aid policies, the admissions deans of the three universities are currently touring 19 cities across the country.