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February 2005
Admission to Ivy League Schools Becoming More Difficult
Admission to Ivy League and other elite schools is growing
more competitive than ever. The top schools are rejecting up
to 90% of applicants, including some with perfect grade
point averages and high standardized test scores. The
situation has gotten to the point where some are describing
Ivy League admission outposts as "offices of rejection."
More
students than ever are applying to the nation's top colleges
and universities. These include the eight Ivies – Columbia,
Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton and Yale – and
other elite schools, among them Amherst, Berkeley, Caltech,
Chicago, Duke, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Northwestern,
Pomona, Smith, Stanford, Swarthmore, Vassar, Washington
University in St. Louis, Wellesley, and Williams.
Seven
of the eight Ivy League schools saw increases in the total
number of applications they received this year. Princeton
received an unprecedented 19,675 applications, a 17%
increase over the previous year, according to the Yale Daily
News. Harvard also saw a record high of 22,717
applications, a 15% increase over the previous year. Brown
had a relatively modest 10% increase for the class of 2008,
while Cornell, Dartmouth and Columbia saw applications
increase by 14%, 7% and 5.5%, respectively.
The
one exception to this trend was Yale University, where
application volume actually declined by 1.2% from the
previous year’s record high. Yale officials and outside
observers see little significance in that fact. "These
trends go up and down," says Yale Dean of Admissions Richard
Shaw. "If it was a precipitated drop I'd worry, but we had a
record high last year."
The
reasons behind the growing number of applications to elite
colleges and universities include changing attitudes,
technology, and demographics.
More
and more students feel that elite schools are accessible to
them. That's true partly because of intensified minority
recruiting and partly because of more scholarship money being available.
"I
think it (rising numbers of applicants) is a convergence of
good recruiting and the increased feeling of accessibility
on the financial front, and an improved recognition that
Harvard is affordable for students who have financial
needs," says Marilyn McGrath Lewis, Harvard's director of
admissions.
"As
recently as the early 1960s, Harvard admitted about 50% of
applicants. But the reason was most students (in the
country) were not as prepared to go on to higher education
or could afford it," says Deb Schmidt, who spent
several years on
the undergraduate admissions committees at Cornell University and Carleton
College before joining
AdmissionsConsultants.
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