<p>For CollegeMom48,</p>
<p>These numbers are taken from the NY Times:</p>
<p>Applicant numbers for a variety of PRIVATE universities/colleges:</p>
<p>Duke
31600</p>
<p>Williams College
7,067</p>
<p>Yale
28974</p>
<p>Penn
31217</p>
<p>Stanford
36631</p>
<p>Harvard
34302</p>
<p>Notre Dame
16547 for 2011 entering class-Could not find number for 2012</p>
<p>University of Southern California
46030</p>
<p>Thanks for the info - makes me wonder if applicant numbers will go down as potential students see how much more selective USC has become?</p>
<p>CollegeMom,</p>
<p>This is an opinion, but it appears the more selective a university becomes the more students wish to enroll.</p>
<p>I don’t think USC will drop in application numbers because of becoming more selective. It will probably continue to get more applicants whilst becoming more selective due to increasing yield (affected by increasing selectivity) but it might reach a sort of plateau.</p>
<p>@Georgia Girl</p>
<p>that seems pretty off to me considering UCLA retrieves a lot of applications by record… and UCLA is pretty much as selective as schools like Cal and USC</p>
<p>If you check the title of the post it is referring to private universities/colleges. UCLA is a public university.</p>
<p>Historically schools switching to the CommonApp see a 20 - 30% jump in apps the first year. For USC this came to ~24%. The ensuing year, as a few more students “discover” the ease of the CA, schools see an additional bump in the 5 - 10% range; that would project out to 48 - 50,000 USC apps this year.</p>
<p>The reality is that college admissions is a good old-fashioned arms race. Very good students will now apply to SC because it’s become more selective and therefore “worthy” of their consideration. Fearing getting closed out at other selective schools SC will become one more on their list; all of this aided and abetted by the convenience of the CA. “Borderline” (3.6/2000) students, hoping to strike gold at a more selective school will add SC to their list as well. Before you know it 50,000 have happily forked over $70 ($3.5 Million) all because they don’t want to “miss out”. {For a similar example, walk by your local Apple store and witness idiots camping out overnight for a phone that two weeks from now they’ll be able to walk in and buy in 5 minutes in any one of a million Verizon stores. Is it just me or does anyone else wonder if Apple hires these twits to camp out so they can get the free publicity? But I digress.} </p>
<p>I’m not knocking the school or the business decision. If I were at SC I’d be doing the same thing. I am wondering about the lemming mentality that’s gripping the whole process whether it’s at USC, UCB, Michigan, Penn or dear UCLA. Personally I find the 50,000 number mind-boggling but then I never thought a year’s worth of college tuition could cost more than the first house my wife and I bought either.</p>