One second after the Yale online admissions Web site was activated at exactly 9 a.m. yesterday, 100 students had logged on. One minute later, approximately 500 students were simultaneously accessing the site. And by 9 p.m., 1,191 of the nearly 1,500 students accepted to Yale in the regular decision pool had seen their admissions results online.
Yale sent acceptance letters to 1,459 students on Wednesday, inviting them to join the Class of 2006. Including the 549 people admitted early to Yale, 2,008 students from all 50 states and 61 countries around the world will receive good news from Yale this year.
With the record-high 15,443 applications Yale received this year, the competition for those 2,008 slots was tighter than ever before, yielding an admittance rate of 13.0 percent. Last year’s admittance rate was 13.5 percent, with 2,000 students accepted out of a total applicant pool of 14,809.
Yale is outdoing itself in welcoming those accepted behind its Ivy walls. The admissions office has not only posted information tailored to each student who logs on to the notification Web site, it also plans to call every admitted student for the first time in school history.
By 9 p.m. yesterday, 9,756 applicants had accessed the site, with students logging on multiple times to push the number of total hits to 15,574.
“It is working flawlessly!” Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Richard Shaw said in an e-mail.
Alexander Clark ’04 said he emphasized precision and accuracy as he fine-tuned the design of the Web site.
“Our clocks had been synchronized hours [before activation] with the atomic clocks in Boulder, Colo.,” Clark said in an e-mail.
The new Web site has a plethora of features added since the early decision candidates first logged on in December. In addition to listing contact information for current Yalies with similar interests, as expressed by admitted students in a brief questionnaire on the site, there is now streaming video and radio, as well as interactive explorations of Yale life.
Students can go on a virtual tour of the campus, see a detailed map of a residential college, read blurbs about each residential college as they are guided through painted representations of each, and view slide shows with titles like “The Seasons of New Haven” and “Yale From the Inside Out.”
Susanna Moore from Holly Springs, Miss., said she has logged on to the Web site about 10 times since she found out on the site that she was accepted.
“Because it was online it was hard for me to believe it at first,” said Moore.
Moore gave her father, who now lives in New York, the information for logging on to the site. She said it was nice that he could share the experience, even though he was hundreds of miles away.
Of the people admitted to the Class of 2006, 42 percent are minority students. Shaw said a majority of accepted students were in the top 10 percent of their secondary school class. There are 189 international students among those who will receive thick admissions packets this year, including 33 from Canada.
Dartmouth College accepted 2,077 of its 10,160 applicants, Dartmouth Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Karl Furstenberg said. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology had 10,664 applicants and accepted 1,690 students, Marilyn Sullivan of the MIT admissions office said. Harvard University will release its admissions statistics today, Director of Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis said.
Jessica Seigler, a senior at the University of Chicago Laboratories High School who found out online yesterday that she was accepted to Yale, said she will visit Yale one more time before she sends in the postcard that will seal her fate. But she said there is little doubt as to where she will end up.
“I’m definitely going to Yale,” she said. “Absolutely.”