Yale College saw a record-low acceptance rate of 7.5 percent this year, a 0.8 percentage point drop from last year’s initial acceptance rate of 8.3 percent.
Yale accepted 1,951 students from the total regular and early applicant pool of exactly 26,000 applicants, Dean of Admissions Jeff Brenzel told the News on Tuesday. The overall admit rate will rise slightly if Yale admits students from its waitlist, Brenzel said.
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Compared to last year, a greater proportion of students were admitted regular decision as opposed to early action. Yale admitted 1,209 out of its 20,444 regular decision applicants. Factoring the 2,644 students deferred for early admission into the regular applicant pool, the regular admit rate is 5.4 percent.
At this time last year, the University admitted 1,007 of its 17,925 regular applicants.
Although Yale received a record number of early action applications this year, the University admitted fewer students early than it did last year. Out of the 5,556 students who applied early action to Yale, 742 were accepted, an acceptance rate of 13.4 percent.
The number of students placed on Yale’s waitlist fell 27 percent compared to last year, down to 769 students from 1,052 for the class of 2012.
Last year, Yale admitted an additional 60 students from the waitlist, Brenzel said, resulting in a final overall admit rate of 8.6 percent. He added that he expects to admit students from the waitlist this May, but Brenzel said he could not predict how many students on the waitlist would be ultimately accepted.
This year, the Admissions Office aims to matriculate a class of about 1,310, Brenzel said, down from 1,320 last year.
Several of Yale’s peer institutions also posted record-low acceptance rates this year. Harvard University announced Tuesday that it admitted 7 percent of applicants, while the Massachusetts Institute of Technology admitted 10.2 percent of applicants, MIT Dean of Admissions Stuart Schmill said. Brown and Columbia universities also announced their lowest-ever acceptance rates, admitting 10.8 and 9.8 percent of applicants respectively, spokesmen for both universities said.
The University of Pennsylvania saw a small increase in its acceptance rate, which rose to 17.1 percent from 17 percent, the Daily Pennsylvanian reported. The remaining Ivy League universities had not announced their acceptance rates as of Tuesday afternoon.
The total number of applications for Yale’s class of 2013 increased 14 percent over last year’s total of 22,817 applications. Early applications this year rose 13.7 percent over last year’s total.