Wilson School accepts 90 of roughly 160 applicants

This year’s acceptance rate was slightly lower than last year’s, when 90 of 154 applicants from the Class of 2010 were accepted. In 2007, 190 members of the Class of 2009 applied for a position in the school.

Wilson School professor Stanley Katz, a former chair of the Undergraduate Program Committee in the Wilson School, said Friday that the admission committee “put three or four people on the waiting list,” which, while not unprecedented, does not occur every year.

As a member of the admission committee, which is composed of “seven or eight faculty,” Katz said he spent a day reading through “a pile of about 125” applications this year. Three faculty members read each application, he added.

The application process helps identify students who are genuinely interested in public policy, Katz said.

The application, comprised of a transcript, a recommendation and personal essays, also asks students to specify an area of interest.

The admission committee’s criteria for applicants have not changed from those used in previous years, Katz said, adding that the personal statement remains the most important part of the application.

“The letter of recommendation is also important, and the [applicants] who are most fortunate are the people who have faculty members to write recommendations for them,” he explained.

Wilson School professor Gary Bass, the current Undergraduate Program faculty chair in the Wilson School, declined to comment for this article.

The Wilson School has accepted 90 sophomores each year since 1995.

“I was really excited when I was accepted [to the Wilson School],” Shawn Kothari ’11 said. “I came to Princeton hoping that I would get accepted to the program, and my interest in the program intensified over my first three semesters here.”

Miheer Mhatre ’11, who was also accepted, said that he would most likely have entered the politics department had he not been accepted.

“With the politics route, you get a really in-depth study of the discipline,” he said. “But you get a little bit of everything in the Wilson School, which was more attractive to me.”