What’s the reason for Williams & Georgetown’s early application numbers going down drastically?
Among top 20 elites, Brown, Rice & Duke came out as hot favourites among early birds this year.
I was more curious why U Chicago’s numbers are so high. Test optional admissions, perhaps?
You also get an idea of which schools filled up their classes with early admits. Hopkins, Chicago, Middlebury, Amherst, Williams etc grabbed as many as they could to artificially inflate yield rates.
" Williams & Georgetown’s early application numbers going down drastically?"
Williams went down by 8%. Georgetown by 7%. How is that drastic? Why isn’t it normal fluctuation? If you were talking about a 39% rise as seen by Rice or a 42% rise as seen by NYU I can understand using the term “Drastic”. But less than 10% difference, not drastic.
Applications to Rice University soared due to a new financial aid grant program.
Duke up for a variety of reasons including their exposure as the #1 basketball team in the nation.
While the declines at Williams College & at Georgetown University are not drastic, they are noteworthy.
The early admission rates at three (and probably 4 since Swarthmore did not disclose) of the nation’s top 5 LACs is eye-opening.
It is hard to understand whether anyone is losing or gaining charm based on early application numbers only. It is also difficult to interpret if Chicago is artificially inflating yield rate from this table. There is no admit rate listed.
Why do you assume colleges are “artificially inflating yield rates” through higher ED /EA admissions, rather than using the opportunity to better structure the freshman class they want, as well as increase their own certainty and planning ability?
Agree also that one needs to see full numbers rather than just gauging from early applications. (I’d be very surprised if NYU and Rice managed to increase overall applicants by 40% too.) Incentives are different too. EA at Georgetown is more competitive than RD but it’s still REA; ED on the other hand is usually an advantage to the applicant.
(Also, pet peeve: it’s losing.)
All Ivies went up as usual, only Princeton went down and surprisingly Brown rocked.
As William and Amherst are always tied for top LAC, Amherst clearly won this round by a huge margin.
NYU & Rice are the best performers. This is first year Rice raised their financial aid to Ivy level so became a real possibility for more applicants.
Didn’t G’Town drop from 20 to 22 in the USNWR rankings? Applying to something outside the T20 is just unfathomable.
The University of Rochester saw a notable increase (in early applicants) of 35%.
This is likely a sign of good southern and midwestern schools finally getting long due recognition as internet is making it possible for applicants to access information about more colleges, not limiting it to few east coast elites traditionally favoured by the media. Ivy League’s monopoly may not last for long.
I think the uptick in early applications is a number of factors. For one, students are getting more savvy, and know their chances of getting accepted are “better” if they apply ED or EA. Further, where the early apps were “traditionally” a thing practiced by students in private high schools, that has changed. Now, the masses do it, too.
It will be interesting to see what the total number of applications to these same universities will be vs last year.
ED traditionally favoured wealthy and low income but as now more applicants know about extreme financial aid policies of elite colleges, more middle class applicants are applying ED. Unfortunately, higher EFC middle class can’t afford to apply ED. For them it’s safer to apply RD.
Simple. UChicago also offers (in addition to ED) unrestricted EA , which attracts far more applicants even though their chances are near zero if they aren’t hooked.
It still seems very high. MIT offers unrestricted EA, too, yet apparently they get fewer applicants with “zero” chance of acceptance. I wonder if the Chicago figure is accurate.
MIT is different. MIT applicants are much more self-selected than UChicago. You generally don’t want to go to MIT unless you’re certain that you want to major in STEM and be prepare to “drink water from the fire hose”. If you don’t succeed, you don’t have many options to fall back on. Caltech, another tech school, is even more so.
So, there are thousands of applicants who have never heard of “where fun goes to die”
The amount of rigor is all relative. Taking 4 courses/quarter would be considered a heavy load at UChicago, but a light load at Caltech, for example, where a student takes 5 to 6 (even more difficult) courses/quarter on average.
The Brown Promise and The Rice Investment are brand new and quite exciting. ED at those institutions suddenly became accessible to a larger number of potential applicants. I am therefore not surprised at all to see a huge bump in early decision applicants and think that number will hold steady or grow even further for next year.
I anticipate we will see a similar jump at Johns Hopkins in next year’s cycle thanks to the $1.8 billion gift from Bloomsberg specifically earmarked for financial aid.
I don’t think people should overreact to a tiny dip in the number of ED applicants to a school like Princeton. It’s not like Princeton suddenly became easy to get into! Yes, fine, they have 1% fewer early applicants this year…but they still had 5335 ED applicants! Princeton is still going to admit a seriously single digit number of total applicants, like 5-7%. In other words, it will remain ferociously difficult to get admitted to Princeton.
This article implies Chicago expected to see an increase in applicants since becoming test optional, and says it has improved its financial aid offering too https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2018/06/19/university-chicago-drops-satact-requirement
Other colleges in the past have reported significant increases in applications after becoming test-optional, it makes sense that Chicago would follow that trend.