interesteddad

Admission stats, according to the press release and Phoenix article:

http://www.swarthmore.edu/news/relea...class2010.html

http://phoenix.swarthmore.edu/2006-04-06/news/16060

Total apps:

Class of 09: 4085
Class of 10: 4850 (19% increase)

Acceptances (not inc. waitlist):

Class of 09: 900
Class of 10: 897 (18.5% acceptance rate)

Early Decision apps:

Class of 09: 321
Class of 10: 428 (33% increase)

ED Acceptances:

Class of 09: 160
Class of 10: 156

Other tidbits:

52% of acceptances to US minority students (up from 49% last year). The increase is all in the number of African American students accepted 14%). Asian American (21%) and Latino (16%) were unchanged.

63% of acceptances from public high schools (up from 60% last year).

33% were valedicatorian/salutatorian, up 2% from last year.

56% were in top 2%, up 3% from last year.

91% were in top 10%, up 1% from last year.

Most popular states:

California (2nd last year)
New York
New Jersey
Pennsylvania
Texas
Massachusetts
Maryland
Florida
Georgia
Virginia
Illinois
Ohio

Most popular countries:

China, Korea (6 each)
India, Greece (3 each)
Ghana, Singapore, Hong Kong, Turkey (2 each)

Kithburd

Any idea if/when they'll release waitlist stats (not the actual descision)? I got waitlisted, and I'm mildly curious about my chances. I've been searching for over an hour and not yet found the least mention of actual Swarthmore waitlist stats in any past year one can name. Failing that, does anyone have any rough idea about how many waitlisted students there are, and how many are admitted?

I'm going to visit campus for the first time in a few weeks, and am planning to interview and send them some extra stuff, so with any luck they'll realize that I didn't just apply for safety in numbers. :}

mommamia

The common data sets have wait list figures.

interesteddad

Last year's waitlist:

959 waitlisted
358 accepted a place on the waitlist
18 admitted from waitlist

Kithburd

Ah, thank you. :} I don't know how that evaded Google so effectively.

achat

Today's Gazette:
http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/org/daily/

sven

Interestedad, thank you for the data. Do you know whether the profile of the early admits is available? In other words, does Swat or any other institution offer the profile for the 156 early admits -- SAT, GPA, etc., etc. The Common Data Set does not give this important detail nor do the offices of institutional research. The authors of the Early Admission Game pulled it out of the colleges, but that data is now ten years old. Any thoughts?

hellohowareyou

the number of waitlisted students, and especially the number admitted off the waitlist, is so low that I doubt they publish data on those students. Are you still on the Swarthmore waitlist??

sven

No, not in the waitlist, but interested in evaluating the prospects for an early application this year. None of the institutional data offices publish the ED applicant or admit profile, so the critical information that bears on this important decision is not made available. Sure, the raw numbers can be compared, i.e., the percentage of regular versus the percentage of early admits, but that is meaningless (or nearly so anyway) without knowing how those two pools of applicants compare.

dadx3

The folks in admissions say that the ED pool is significantly stronger than the RD pool. Therefore it is reasonable that a higher percentage get admitted than in the RD pool. They thus say that for any individual applicant applying ED does not significantly increase the chance of getting admitted.

Of course, as Sven says, we don't have data to make this assessment ourselves. The admissions office certainly has the data, and I presume that they look at it fairly closely.

goldie

Would anyone happened to know statistics of early-writes?

interesteddad

Goldie:

I have never seen stats for "early writes". However, I tracked College Confidential acceptances this year. 63 students from CC were accepted that I know about. 22 of these were accepted Early Decision. 30 of 41 regular decision acceptance received Early Write letters, which is Swarthmore's case, go out a couple of weeks early. The College Confidential sample is obviously quite skewed, because Swat's overall percentage of Early Writes is nowhere near that high. Also, 63 of 100 College Confidential applicants were accepted, which is obviously atypical!

The group of Early Writes was very heavily tilted toward students who had multiple acceptances at top Ivy League schools, top-3 LACs, and/or full ride merit scholarship deals at "lower ranked" schools. They were also very heavily tilted towards students who would increase diversity on campus (ethnically and/or socio-economic).

One danger in looking at "stats" for Swarthmore is that it is easy to overlook the emphasis Swat places on diversity. More than half of the acceptance letters Swat sent this year were to non-white students.

In that sense, you almost have to look at "chances" qualitatively rather than quantitatively. For example, I can look at one "what are my chances" question with 1550 SATs and think that there is almost no chance of getting accepted and another with 1400 SATS and predict almost certain acceptance. For example, I only told two applicants this year that I thought they had near 100% chance of admission (I was right on both). One of them had mid-1400 SATs.

sven

Although I've not heard the Swat admissions people speak on this topic, other offices claim that the two pools (ED and RD) vary little in strength. And, the only researchers with access to the data (Early Admissions Game) demonstrated that the ED pool was actually weaker. I've seen no data suggesting that the ED pool is stronger.

nngmm

At every school that we've visited (Swarthmore, Stanford, MIT, WUSTL, etc.), admissions people explicitly stated that ED/EA statistics are misleading because early applicants' pool is much stronger.

interesteddad

Sven:

I think we may be dealing with two very different definitions of "stronger". On the one hand, we have superficial measures like SAT scores. On the other hand, I've seen interviews with Jim Bock at Swarthmore in which he highlights the "Why Swarthmore?" essay as being particularly important. He points out that applicants who communicate specific, well researched reasons for enthusiasm and "fit" with the school are much more attractive than applicants who stick with generic stuff like location, rigorous academics, etc.

Thus, a student with 2150 SATS who writes an essay about a particular professor's course (like Tim Burke's History of the Future seminar) or something else quinetessentially "Swarthmore" could indeed be a stronger applicant than a 2350 SAT kid who writes a generic application.

My experience tracking College Confidential kids last year (26 of 39 ED/EDII applicants were accepted) is that this group had really done their homework on Swat and were obviously enthusiastic about the school. This kind of enthusiasm jumps off the application in a way that somebody applying to Swat as just one of 10 schools on a laundry list could never hope to accomplish. The 26 accepted ED students here were all over the board in terms of test scores. But, they all were able to effectively communicate their "Swattiness".

Also, keep in mind that, because ED is binding, the admissions office is measuring these applicants against what they know will be the enrolled class, not against the larger pool of accepted students. The accepted pool always has higher stats because it includes a number of high stat kids who have multiple acceptances at places like Harvard. Everything I've seen indicates that the accepted ED students closely mirror the stats of the actual enrolled class.