Yale admitted 842 students out of the record 5,733 early applicants to the Class of 2022 on Dec. 14.
The number of admitted students represents 14.7 percent of applicants and is slightly smaller than last year’s figure of 871. This year, 55 percent of early applicants were deferred for reconsideration in the spring, 29 percent were denied admission and 2 percent either withdrew or submitted incomplete forms.
On Dec. 1, Yale also offered admission to 52 students through the QuestBridge National College Match Program. The program helps high-achieving, low-income students gain admission to and full scholarships at 39 partner colleges, including Yale.
“The Admissions Committee was very impressed with this year’s early applicant pool across every dimension,” Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Jeremiah Quinlan said in a statement to the News. “We are pleased to offer admission to this first group of students in the Class of 2022, and look forward to admitting a much larger group of students through our regular decision process this spring.”
This year’s pool marked a steep rise in Yale’s single-choice early action application total for the second consecutive year. Last year, 5,086 students applied early to Yale, and in the three previous years the number of applications consistently hovered around 4,700.
Earlier this year, Quinlan told the News that as the early action pool has grown, it has become increasingly diverse, with a larger number of applicants from groups traditionally underrepresented at Yale and in higher education more broadly. For the past several years, he added, the University has focused on outreach to students with low-income backgrounds who “traditionally did not think of Yale as a realistic college option.”
This year, the increase in applications from “virtually every subgroup of applicants that the admissions office tracks” — including U.S. citizens and permanent residents who identify as members of a minority racial or ethnic group, first-generation college students and international students — outpaced the overall increase in applications, said Director of Outreach and Communications Mark Dunn ’07 in November. He added that Yale received early action applications from 49 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and 98 foreign countries.
Earlier this fall, Quinlan told the News that Yale plans to enroll about 1,550 students in the class of 2022.
In April, as part of its recruitment efforts, Yale will once again offer a Bulldog Saturday program in addition to the regular Bulldog Days program aimed to showcase Yale to prospective students and parents. Bulldog Saturday, a mini-version of Bulldog Days, began last year to accommodate the larger size of the incoming class.
“The addition of Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray colleges enables us to bring to Yale more students from a more diverse collection of backgrounds.” Quinlan said. “The combination of expanding enrollment and greater representation of students from under-resourced backgrounds means more opportunity for more students.”
Yale’s peer schools admitted similar percentages of their early applicants to the class of 2022. Earlier this week, Harvard and Princeton, which have early action programs similar to Yale’s, admitted 14.5 and 14.7 percent of applicants, respectively.
Anastasiia Posnova | anastasiia.posnova@yale.edu