Penn’s acceptance rate fell below 10 percent for the second year in a row.
Today at 5 p.m. EST, regular decision applicants to the Class of 2019 will be able to access their decisions via the online applicant portal. Of 37,267 students who applied to Penn in the early and regular rounds, 3,697 were admitted, leading to an overall acceptance rate of 9.9 percent. Last year’s overall acceptance rate was also 9.9 percent.
Penn enrolls a class of 2,420 students in the Class of 2019 across the College of Arts and Sciences, the Wharton School, Penn Engineering and the School of Nursing.
An all-time high of 54.4 percent of the Class of 2019 was filled with early decision applicants, making the regular decision round more competitive.
ED/EA is becoming even more vital to have any decent chance whatsoever…and while EA isn’t necessarily a problem, ED is truly an issue for folks like us with money concerns (yes, you can back out later…but you’ve missed your opportunity to apply elsewhere).
also, it means that extraordinary kids will be tossed by the wayside…with no rhyme or reason to it.
while a number also land on the vast wasteland of false hope known as the waitlist…
Okay @blossom LOL…maybe i stated that a bit too harshly. I meant that within the context of kids who applied to upenn, the vast majority will be qualified applicants…and the vast vast majority of them will be rejected today at 5. And there will truly be no logic to it…
Actually, the opportunities lost are confined to another ED school or one of the SCEA (REA) schools. Applying ED does not interfere with rolling admission schools, most state schools, and finally the entire RD process.
There is no consensus about the real ADDED opportunity to apply early in terms of better chances. Some mainly suggest that it benefits superior candidates who would chosen in the RD round by the same schools. While the statistics clearly show advantages, none of us can do more than speculate about this.
The ED card is a powerful one, but probably works better at less prestigious schools than at the small number of schools that get all the ink.
I admit to being somewhat uncomfortable about the fairness of the ED process since quite a few top schools admit a large % of the class that way. But OTOH, a student who is accepted ED withdraws his/her other apps. Compare that to the student who gets in REA at a first choice but keeps the other apps pending to collect trophy admissions. (At least this is the rumor at D’s high school about the kid who got in REA to Stanford.)
Penn turned down some great kids who were legacies in this area a few years ago to send the message loud and clear that if you want the legacy boost, you had better apply ED. Most all of the legacies I know applied ED this year, many of them eschewing the opportunity to do SCEA or ED elsewhere. They were scared.
The kid who gets accepted EA has every right to keep his apps pending for any reason. There are good reasons to do this, in that things can happen between November and May and it’s good to have some alternatives, some with merit money, to boot. I know a kid who got into trouble and had an ED accept that was endangered which caused a lot of unnecessary stress. The other kids in the same boat had other choices, alternatives, that he had shelved. So I would not recommend someone with an EA accept to let loose their other apps. You just never know. On the other hand, with ED, it is something to which you agreed to do, and you are welching on your word by not withdrawing apps.
Just to bolster @southernhope 's comments. The loss of diversity in the class that comes from “crowding out” qualified yet financially sensitive candidates is a loss for the admitted students worst of all.
On Columbia’s statistics: it depends on how you look at it. Another way to describe what happened is to say that their rejection rate increased from 93.06% to 93.9%, which sounds a lot more like “slightly.” Call it the “glass is almost entirely empty” viewpoint, v. the “glass has a tiny bit left in it” way of looking at things.
Or: your chance of getting accepted went from 5-in-72 to 5-in-82.
Or: the typical applicant had almost no chance of being accepted last year and had almost no chance of being accepted this year.
On the ED-process point: I’m with the people who think the process has gotten ridiculous.
A fundamental problem is that often a person who’d have a relatively high-percentage shot at getting admitted to, say, any one of his top 10 choices essentially gets a shot at only one of them. Consider (just an example, with somewhat arbitrary numbers):
A strong applicant with, say, a 30% chance of getting accepted at each of his top 10 choices is extremely likely to get accepted at at least one of them if he applies to all 10 in a straight-up system: 97%, by my calculation.
In an ED-weighted system (let's assume all his top 10 are heavily tilted toward EDs, like the schools mentioned in this thread), he has to pick just one to apply to ED, or take a longer shot in the regular-decision route.
It essentially randomizes what’s already an overly-random process.
In the unlikely event the colleges (or even just the selective+ ones) could get their acts together, the world would be enormously improved by replacing the whole shebang with a match system, like the one used to place medical residents.
The New York City specialized schools also use a match a system, though in their case it’s considerably simpler, since they place off of a single, quantified dimension (score on the test).
