Admit rate falls to 14.2 percent

At 5 p.m. Thursday, applicants all over the world will find out whether they’ve been accepted to Penn’s class of 2014.

This year marks the University’s most selective year ever, with an overall acceptance rate of 14.2 percent, according to Dean of Admissions Eric Furda. That is a 2.9-percent drop from last year’s 17.1-percent acceptance rate.

Penn received a total of 26,938 applications and accepted 3,830, Furda said. The target enrollment across all four undergraduate schools is 2,420 students.

Penn isn’t the only competitive school that accepted a smaller percentage of applicants this year.

Cornell, Harvard, Stanford and Duke Universities, as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all saw their lowest acceptance rates ever.

Like Penn, the seven other Ivy League schools will be notifying applicants of their decisions Thursday. All Ivies except Yale University — which received 134 fewer applications — saw a significant increase in number of applicants this year.

Harvard received more than 30,000 applications for the first time ever. MIT faced a 6.2-percent increase in applicants this year, resulting in a 9.7-percent admission rate.

Stanford received over 32,000 applications and accepted 7.2 percent last Friday, while Duke received 26,770 and accepted 14.8 percent.

Tim Lear, the director of college counseling at the Pingry School in Martinsville, N.J., wrote in an e-mail that once students and parents read about the lower acceptances seen nationwide, “the instinct will be to panic.”

While this might inspire next year’s seniors to apply to even more schools, Lear doesn’t believe sending more applications increases chances of being accepted to a top-choice school.

“I think the wiser approach is for students and counselors to take a step back and evaluate why they are applying to certain schools,” he wrote.

Head of Hernandez College Consulting Michele Hernandez wrote in an e-mail that she thinks this year’s low acceptance rates will cause next year’s seniors to apply to even more schools.

“Students panic and see how hard it is to get in, […] more students apply to [a] greater number of schools, flooding all the top colleges with an incredible number of highly qualified applicants,” she wrote.

Hernandez said the huge pool makes it easy for colleges to “pick the creme de la creme,” but this makes yield rates more unpredictable.

“Because there is more overlap with top colleges … everyone’s yield tends to go down in this case,” she wrote. “Any time numbers are up this much, yields are bound to fluctuate.”

While there were many applications to read, Admissions took care to remember that “each of these applicants have made significant contributions in the classroom, to their school and to the larger community,” Furda wrote in an e-mail.

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