Construction, admissions discussed at CPUC meeting

Earlier on Monday, the Graduate School announced that it had admitted 1,183, 10.6 percent, of the 11,123 applicants for the 2010-11 academic year. The University admitted 16 percent of applicants in the the natural sciences and mathematics fields. The admission rates for applicants in engineering, the Wilson School, humanities, social sciences and the School of Architecture were 13, 11, 8, 7 and 6 percent, respectively.

With 636 students accepting offers of admission by April 15, the yield rose to almost 54 percent, from 52 percent last year. At the CPUC meeting, Dean of the Graduate School William Russel said the yield marked “the first change in probably five years.”

Russel also noted a “disappointing decline” in yield for underrepresented minorities, which fell to roughly 50 percent this year after holding steady at about 60 percent for the past few years. “This could possibly be just because they are competing very strongly for the same proportion of spots,” Russel explained.

The gender balance was consistent with past years, with females comprising 37 percent of the admitted class.

“Women in science and engineering are a priority,” Russel said, noting increased efforts by Karen Jackson-Weaver ’94, associate dean for academic affairs and diversity, to encourage female engineers to apply. Russel estimated that roughly 25 percent of current engineering graduate students are female.

Dean of Admission Janet Rapelye announced that, based on initial response among admitted students, her office will turn to the waitlist to reach a target class size of 1,308. “We are very happy to be where we are right now,” she said. Rapelye noted that she did not yet know what the yield was since the deadline for admitted students to accept their offers of admission was on May 1, just two days before the meeting.

Rapelye also said that the third class admitted after the elimination of early decision features demographic changes.

After eliminating early decision, “the pool balanced itself out in terms of men and women,” which was “actually interesting, and not something either expected or intuitive,” Rapelye said. “It was always a concern for us that we always had about 1,000 more men applying in the past when we had early decision.”

Rapelye said that eliminating early decision also allowed for a more balanced application cycle. “If we had early decision this year, we would have had approximately 2,000 applications for the first half of the class and we would have had more than 24,000 for the second half of the class, and there is no way to say that would have been a fair application process,” she explained.

In response to audience questions about the effect of admission policies on underprivileged students, Rapelye said, “We’ve had to retrain our readers on how to read low-income files because the files themselves do not look nearly as competitive on the first glance as other students’.”