The Graduate School received 11,689 applications for the 2011-12 academic year, up 5 percent from last year. A total of 1,197 graduate students were accepted, for a 10.2 percent overall admissions rate, slightly lower than last year’s admissions rate of 10.7 percent.
By the April 15 postmark deadline, 623 — or 52 percent — of admitted students accepted the University’s offer of admission, slightly down from last year’s yield of nearly 54 percent.
This year marked at least the third time in the Graduate School’s history that international applicants exceeded U.S. applicants, with 5,936 international students making up 51 percent of the applicant pool. The remainder of the applicant pool consisted of 5,753 U.S. residents and permanent citizens. The incoming class includes students from 56 countries, with the largest number of students expected from, in order, China, India, Canada, Korea, Singapore and the United Kingdom.
American minorities made up 1,425 of the total applicants, including 824 Asian-Americans, 372 Hispanics, 219 African-Americans and 10 Native Americans. Of these minority students, 198 were admitted to the Graduate School.
David Redman, the Graduate School’s associate dean for academic affairs, said in a University statement that the Graduate School has been working hard at recruitment and retention of students from minority and underrepresented backgrounds.
“The Graduate School continues to be open to literally every applicant in the world, and our programs attract a global pool of master’s and doctoral candidates,” Redman said in the statement. “In addition to our international base of applicants, we will continue our efforts to recruit a diverse group of students from around the United States.”
He noted that the Princeton Summer Undergraduate Research Experience, an eight-week program for prospective students interested in pursuing doctoral degrees, has been instrumental in generating high-quality applicants. Some recent participants in the program applied and were offered admission to the Graduate School this year, he said.
Of the admitted students, 460 — or 38 percent — are women, while 737 — or 62 percent — are men.
Redman said that a significant factor that attracts graduate school applicants to the University is the size of the stipend offered to doctoral candidates.
“Princeton’s Graduate School has long set the standard for full funding for doctoral students,” Redman said in the statement. “Our students also teach and win outside fellowships, but the base support that we offer doctoral candidates is significant and very attractive to applicants.”
The University’s graduate stipend will be $26,784 in the 2011-12 academic year, up 3 percent from this year’s standard stipend of $26,000.
The natural sciences and mathematics departments admitted the highest proportion of applications this year, followed by the Wilson School, engineering, the humanities, the social sciences and the architecture school.
Correction
An earlier version of this article stated that this was the first year where international Graduate School applicants outnumbered domestic ones, in accordance with a University press release. The University has since issued a correction stating that there were at least two other cycles in the Graduate School's history where this occured. This article has been updated to reflect these changes.
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