As reported earlier, I heard that a number of applicants to Cornell last year had sent in their application without indicating which undergraduate college they would like to be considered at. Well, the university has kindly released the numbers, and the total number of students who should not have been admitted anywhere for virtue of their carelessness was 1,114. I wonder where they ended up… Anyways, I’ve compiled all of the acceptance rate statistics for Cornell's Class of 2010 together into a convenient table for you to analyze to your heart’s content. Of course, none of these data tell us anything about the quality of the student body (or applicants), but are interesting nonetheless. Of those who indicated which college they wanted to be considered at, the acceptance rate was 25.7 percent. Moreover, had the university not overenrolled by 240 students, it could have lowered its acceptance rate to 22.9 percent. But enrollment management is a hard science to master, especially at such a large institution. Art, Architecture, and Planning had the lowest acceptance rate at 19.9 percent, just under Arts and Sciences. Engineering had the highest acceptance rate at 36.5 percent and the lowest yield rate at 38.5 percent, most likely reflecting its difficulty in recruiting common admits with MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and the like. And for all the Cornell engineers out there—you can probably enjoy some MIT-like street credibility (and yield rates) if you stopped studying and pulled a prank every once in a while. Elsewhere, minority students (a self-reported stat) enjoyed a slightly higher acceptance rate – 26.1 percent, while transfers has a 27 percent acceptance rate, with an outstanding yield rate of 70 percent. And Hotel School admits obviously want to manage hotels for a living—over 80 percent of accepted students there chose to enroll in Statler High.
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