Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Dartmouth's Yield for Class of 2015 decreases to 52 percent

A total of 1,114 students accepted Dartmouth’s offer of admission to the Class of 2015, representing 52 percent of the 2,179 students who received admission to the College in March, according to Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Maria Laskaris. Although this number represents a smaller figure than last year’s historically-large accepted class of 1,187 students, Laskaris said these numbers will likely fluctuate in the upcoming months.
“We have some students who will change their minds, decide to take a year off or get off the wait list of another school,” she said. “It’s still a work in progress.”
Of the 1,800 students invited to join the wait list, 1,100 students opted to remain on the list. Fifty students were accepted from the wait list last week but were granted an extension to consider their admissions offers past the May 1 deadline, according to Laskaris.
The desired class size for the Class of 2015 is a maximum of 1,109 due to housing accommodations and College resources, Laskaris said.
Laskaris said that although the number of students in the Class of 2014 was larger than in previous years, that was a one-time change and the Admissions Office will return to enrolling the usual number of students for future classes. The decision to enlarge the Class of 2014 — increasing the yield rate to 55 percent — was a step to “begin to understand the implications of a larger first year class,” Laskaris said.
The first round of admissions offers for the Class of 2015 was “a bit more conservative” because the Admissions Office “couldn’t take a chance that Dartmouth would have an unexpected bump in yield like last year,” Laskaris said.
“We wanted to be a little under the target instead of over,” Laskaris said, “We planned on using the wait list to build up to our desired first year class size.”
Of the 1,114 students accepted to the Class of 2015, 35 percent are students of color and 7 percent are international students, according to Laskaris.
This year saw an increase in students from the West Coast and the New England regions, according to Laskaris.
The College accepted 25 students as transfer students, most of whom will enter the College as sophomores, Laskaris said. Once the application process was completed, the pools of transfer students and first-year students were evaluated together when admissions officers decided the desired size of the Class of 2015, according to Laskaris
The yield rate for the Class of 2015 was “pretty much where our yield has always been,” Laskaris said. Apart from last year’s elevated rate of 55 percent, Dartmouth’s yield rate has consistently been around 50 percent in past years, ranging from 48 percent in 2009 to 52 percent in 2007, according to the Dartmouth College Fact Book.
Harvard University experienced a significantly higher yield rate than the College, with 77 percent of students accepted to the Class of 2015 accepting their admissions offers. Harvard’s yield is typically among the highest in the nation, according to The Harvard Crimson. Due to a spike in yield rates — up from a yield of 75.5 percent last year — Harvard’s Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William Fitzsimmons said he anticipates admitting approximately 10 to 15 students off the wait list compared to the usual 50 to 125, according to The Crimson.
Other peer institutions have not yet released their yield numbers.

http://thedartmouth.com/2011/05/23/news/yield

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