p. The College’s acceptance rate for the Class of 2011 is 34 percent, a two percent increase from last year.
p. That percentage reflects the 3,652 students who were accepted out of an overall applicant pool of 10,852 — the largest in College history. As of June 12, the yield rate for enrolled students was 37 percent. The College’s goal for the class size is 1,350 enrolled students, the same as last year. As of now, 1,358 have enrolled.
p. Dean of Admissions Henry Broaddus attributed the higher acceptance rate to the fact that fewer early decision students were accepted this year, as a result of having fewer early decision applicants. Broaddus said that fewer applicants could be the result of negative publicity about early acceptance programs at schools like the University of Virginia and Princeton University. For the Class of 2011, 396 early applicants were admitted, while 440 were admitted in the previous year.
p. Broaddus noted that having fewer early decision admits is also a major part of the decreased yield rate, because fewer students are bound to attend the College under and early decision contract.
p. Male applicants were admitted at a rate 16 percent higher than female applicants.
p. This caught the attention of U.S. News & World Report in an article about the increasing difficulty to maintain gender equality on college campuses, noting that the College “is altering its admissions rates to achieve gender balance, if not parity. In the past decade, the school’s portion of women in the undergraduate body has fallen from 60 percent to 54 percent.”
p. Out of the 10,528 applications fielded for admission this fall, 64 percent were female. Despite this statistic, only 53 percent of the admitted students were female, meaning that 28 percent of female applicants were admitted, compared to 44 percent of male applicants.
p. The Department of Education reported that the college-bound population is 57 percent female, and will grow to 60 percent female by 2010.
p. “Our awareness of this demographic reality certainly informs our recruitment strategy in terms of striving to ensure that qualified men know about the opportunities available at [the College],” Broaddus said.
p. Both genders had about a 37 percent yield rate, generating an enrolling class of 728 females and 630 males.
p. “[The College] values a gender balance within its student community,” Broaddus said. “Nonetheless, at no point in our admission process do we hold men, or any other subset of the applicant pool, to a different set of admission standards. The only demographic criterion to which the College is beholden is the in-state/out-of-state ratio of 65/35 as per its agreement with the commonwealth of Virginia.”
p. Sixty-one students were accepted from the waitlist for this fall, which is a significant leap from the 14 who were accepted from last year’s waitlist. Waitlist admission rates vary every year, but typically remain under 5 percent of the overall class.
p. “Many institutions intentionally control the last portion of the class through the waitlist in order to avoid oversubscribing their on-campus housing. We try to hit the mark as closely as possible without use of the waitlist, and a margin of error under 5 percent is actually quite good when it comes to predicting the behavior of 17 year olds,” Broaddus said.
p. The waitlist may be used more frequently if the number of early decision admits continues to drop, to make up for students who are admitted at the College but choose to enroll elsewhere.
p. “Predictability for an enrolling class has become an increasingly slippery thing,” Broaddus said. “The average number of applications a student submits continues to rise. Furthermore, the absence of an early admission round for Harvard, Princeton and p. U.Va. next year means that more of the highly competitive students who matriculate at those institutions will persist longer in the admission process at other institutions, including [the College.]”
p. 27 percent of out-of-state students were accepted, compared to 43 percent of in-state students. The acceptance rate for minority students was 47 percent, which represents 26 percent of the total admitted students. Legacy applicants had a 57 percent acceptance rate, and 51 percent of transfer students were accepted.
p. The class includes a real estate appraiser, a banjo player, a locomotive engine racer, an antique phonograph collector, a women’s lacrosse player who was featured in Sports Illustrated, a female captain of a men’s golf team and a student who founded an organization that raised $40,000 for breast cancer research.
p. “As the profile of this year’s class evidences, we continue to deliver a diverse and accomplished freshman class,” Broaddus said. “At the end of the day, that’s the benchmark that counts most.”