Why does Hopkins have such a high acceptance rate?

bonanza
Wed, 03 Mar 2010 11:16:25 +0000

Its mostly a matter of yield. While Hopkins offers as good (if not better) an academic and social experience than many of the Ivies—The Ivy League has done a remarkable job over the years of promoting the “Ivy” brand, associating the brand with quality and prestige. Because of this successful branding and marketing–the Ivies (except for Cornell) tend to have better yields (i.e., a higher percentage of accepted students choose to attend). The Ivies also tend to have larger applicant pools, but most of the Ivies are also larger than Hopkins (some, like Cornell, are a lot larger) so that the ratio between applicants and actual enrollment is not starkly different between Hopkins and the Ivies.

This is slowly changing over time. Hopkins’ yield has improved (last year it was much higher than predicted, hence the over-enrollment) and, as a consequence, Hopkins’ acceptance rate has gone down. I read that this year’s RD acceptance rate may be as low as 17%—which is in range of the Ivies.