After the Yale admissions office received a record number of applications this year, 1,458 regular decision applicants found out Wednesday that they had been admitted to the Class of 2007, bringing this year’s overall acceptance rate to an historic low of 11.4 percent.

Regular applicants faced a 9.6 percent acceptance rate, since the University had already admitted 43 percent of the class under its early decision program. The number of overall applicants increased by 14.7 percent this year, from 15,456 to 17,731. Last year, 13 percent of applicants, or 2,008 students, were accepted.

In terms of geography, ethnicity and country of origin, no applicant group stood out as having a higher acceptance rate this year than in the past, Shaw said.

“That’s an interesting reflection of just how incredibly competitive everything was — I don’t think there’s necessarily a category where anything is up. The competition is just getting fiercer.”

The number of international students admitted remained relatively steady; 183 received letters of acceptance. Of those 183 foreign students, 32 are Canadian.

The Class of 2007’s geographic distribution within the United States was similar to that of last year’s class, although the admissions office does not seek a certain number of students from any given area. The Northeast provided the most accepted students, with 688, while there were 366 from the West, 236 from the Midwest, 208 from the South, 152 from the mid-Atlantic states, and 141 from the Southwest.

Thirty-five percent of American students admitted this year are minority students. That number rises to almost 40 percent if international students are considered, Shaw said. In the class of 2006, 42 percent of those accepted were minority students.

Approximately 66 percent of accepted students applied for financial aid this year, a figure that remained relatively constant, Shaw said.

In a change from last year, when applicants rushed to log onto the admissions Web site moments after it went live at 9 a.m., applicants did not know when admissions decisions would be online because of fears that the site might be overwhelmed. Ivy League schools agreed to release admissions decisions online no earlier than yesterday evening, Dean of Admissions Richard Shaw said. Yale’s site was functional by 6 p.m.

“The reason we did it was because last year when we went live in the morning, in every library, every classroom that had computers, the kids were logging on,” Shaw said. “We got a lot of criticism for going live during the school day.”

Shaw said he expects Yale’s yield to be approximately the same as last year — around 65 percent — to form a class of about 1,300 students.

“We think everybody should come,” Shaw said. “But if they do, we’ll be in trouble.”