U. accepts 7.86 percent

The total number of applications includes the 3,443 students who applied to the single-choice early action program in December. 21.09 percent of those students were admitted for the first time since 2006, the last time the University offered an early round of admission.

1,369 of the 23,221 regular decision applicants were admitted, for a regular decision admittance rate of 5.90 percent.

This year’s record-low initial acceptance rate of 7.86 percent is lower than the 8.39 percent rate for the Class of 2015. Last year, 2,282 out of the 27,189 applicants were accepted to the University.

In an interview with The Daily Princetonian in April 2011, Dean of Admission Janet Rapelye predicted that the University would likely have a slightly higher yield this year due to the early action program. This uncertainty in the yield prompted the Office of Admission to initially accept fewer students even though it projects the class size to remain the same as the Class of 2015, Rapelye explained Thursday.

“We’ve gone out with what we thought was a very conservative number in terms of total number of offers because we don’t know what the yield is going to be,” she said. “We have bed space for 1,300 students, and we can’t go over. So we’re looking to hopefully come in just under 1,300 and would like to go into the wait list in May and June.”

As of Thursday afternoon, about 400 of the students accepted through early action had informed the Office of Admission that they will be attending the University. However, these students are not required to withdraw their applications or reject their acceptances to other schools until May 1.

The Office of Admission placed an additional 1,472 applicants on the wait list. Some of the students on the wait list were among the 1,921 applicants that had previously been deferred to the regular applicant pool from early action admission.

“We did that very carefully and thoughtfully, knowing that they have already waited a long time,” Rapelye said. “But we also thought if you’re on the wait list, it means there’s still hope, and we thought that we wanted to extend that offer to some of those students.”

Rapelye said she expects that, much like in previous years, about half of the students will accept their placement on the wait list. Last year, 1,248 applicants were placed on the wait list, and 19 were eventually accepted from it. In the past, the number of students accepted from the wait list has varied greatly, ranging from zero to over 150.

Students in the admitted class come from all 50 states, plus Washington, D.C., Guam, the Northern Marianas Islands and Puerto Rico. 47 percent have identified themselves as people of color, including those who identified as biracial or multiracial. 58 percent come from public schools, and 12.5 percent will be the first in their families to attend college. Sons and daughters of University alumni make up 9.5 percent of admitted students.

49.4 percent of accepted students are females, a similar percentage to last year’s figure. However, Rapelye said that the percentage of BSE candidates admitted who are female increased this year. This year, 22.6 percent of those accepted indicated they intended to study engineering, and 44.4 percent of those students are women.

International students, representing 73 countries, make up 12.2 percent of the accepted students, an increase from the 10.3 percent that were admitted as a part of last year’s class.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

“We have slightly more international students admitted in this group, which we are very happy about,” Rapelye said. “We hope we can yield those students and have them in the class.”

The University offered an early action admission program from 1980 to 1996 and then switched to early decision admission until 2006, when it scrapped an early round of admission entirely.

“One of the reasons we had been concerned about early decision was that ... there were fewer students applying who needed financial aid, and there was less diversity in that early decision pool, and it was a more difficult process as we were trying to put our class together in terms of achieving our institutional priorities,” Rapelye said.

However, although Rapelye emphasized that the University does not have quotas, the pool of students admitted through early action in December “much more resembles what [the Office of Admission] has wanted the classes to look like.”

All admitted students will have the opportunity to visit the University during Princeton Preview Weekends on April 19-21 and April 26-28. They have until May 1 to accept or decline the University’s offer of admission.

“We were really pleased with the quality of the pool,” Rapelye said. “It was very hard work as we came down to the last week or so, and we had to make some difficult decisions, but the group we chose, we’re really pleased about.”

Yale accepted 1,975 students out of 28,975 applicants to the Class of 2016, for an acceptance rate of 6.82 percent. Harvard, which also recently reinstated early action for this year, accepted 5.9 percent, or 2,032 students, of 34,302 applicants.