Despite seeing a record-high 27,189 applicants for the Class of 2015, the University’s initial acceptance rate of 8.39 percent is slightly higher than last year’s rate of 8.18 percent. It extended offers of admission to 2,282 students on Wednesday.
Since the Class of 2011 admissions cycle in 2007, the University’s acceptance rate has remained below 10 percent and has decreased each year aside from slight upticks this year and in 2009.
However, Dean of Admission Janet Rapelye said that admission rates have decreased so sharply in recent years that slight differences between years have become insignificant.
“We are at a point where we are looking at admit rates that are so incredibly low that just focusing on that does not begin to tell the story of how strong these students and classes are,” she explained.
However, Princeton’s slightly increased admission rate is somewhat unique among comparable institutions, as a record number of college applicants over the past two years — coupled with a relative increase in the number of college-age Americans — has caused acceptance rates at highly selective universities across the country to plummet.
Every other Ivy League school announced on Wednesday record-low acceptance rates for this round of admissions.
Harvard (6.2 percent), Yale (7.4 percent), Penn (12.3 percent), Cornell (18 percent), Brown (8.7 percent), Dartmouth (9.7 percent) and Columbia (6.9 percent) all reported having their lowest-ever acceptance rates. Stanford reported an acceptance rate of 7.1 percent.
Princeton came in fifth in selectivity, behind Harvard, Columbia, Stanford and Yale.
“The reason [other schools’] admit rates are down is because their applicant pools have increased,” Rapelye said, though Princeton saw its largest applicant pool ever this year.
However, she explained, the notable decreases in other schools’ acceptance rates may be due to trends in the sorts of schools that college applicants are looking for.
“Schools in urban areas are very popular right now,” Rapelye noted. “We love the location of Princeton University, but it is not in an urban area.”
“They are not trying to drive the admit rate down,” she added, referring to the other schools. “Rather, they are trying to enroll a class.”
The slight increase in its acceptance rate may also have resulted from the University’s gradual expansion of the size of the undergraduate student body, she said.
This year marks the third consecutive that the University has looked to enroll 1,300 students for the incoming class as part of a four-year plan to add an additional 500 undergraduates to the campus population by the 2012-13 academic year.
“When you increase the size of your freshman class, you have to admit more students,” Rapelye added. “This is an incredibly successful group of students we have admitted.”
Though the population trends that led to the recent highly selective years show signs of coming to a close, it is unclear how the precedent of such a statistically imposing stretch will affect future applicant pools.
Rapelye said she is encouraged by the fact that applicant numbers have not fallen despite such increasingly stark odds.
“Every year I am worried that the process has become so selective that students may choose not to apply, but that hasn’t happened yet,” she explained. “Most of the selective schools have continued to see increases in their pools.”
“We have seen a 98.5 percent increase in applications over the past seven years,” she added. “It would be hard to declare that as anything but a victory.”
However, the yearly yield — the number of admitted students who choose to attend Princeton — may be of more concern to the Office of Admission.
Since the elimination of the early decision option for the Class of 2012, the yield has been difficult to predict as new patterns have emerged.
By capping next year’s incoming class at 1,300 and accepting 2,282 students, 134 more than last year, the University is apparently expecting to maintain a yield rate roughly similar to last year’s rate of 56.9 percent.
However, Rapelye explained that it is often difficult to accurately predict the yield rate from initial acceptance rates.
“We are expecting the yield to be somewhere in the range of the last two years, but it is a very hard thing to predict,” she said. “The difference of a few percentage points can throw the numbers up or down quite a bit. I do not have an actual number, but we always look at the last couple of years as our guide.”
The University usually waits until May to determine wait list acceptances, a process that could last well into the summer.
This year, 1,248 students were placed on the wait list, though the University expects only around half of them to elect to remain on the list.
Last year, 164 students were taken off the wait list, and this year’s wait list pool has over 200 fewer students than last year’s.
Despite recent trends, it is still too early to predict whether the wait list will be used, Rapelye said.
“We do not know if we are done yet,” she explained. “Some years we go to the wait list and some years we do not. It is possible that we will not go to the wait list this year ... We will not know until we get to the end of June when we finish the wait list.”
Predicting any sort of future admissions trends, however, will likely be particularly difficult for the University after its decision to reinstate its early admission program for the Class of 2016 takes effect in the next admissions cycle.
“I do not have any way to predict what [reinstating early admission] will mean in terms of the applicant pool or the overall yield,” Rapelye said.
“We will just have to wait and see. But I think it is a very good thing that we will be able to offer another option to students in the process.”
Staff writer Luc Cohen contributed reporting to this article.
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