The Cornell Chronicle has some more statistics on applications for Cornell's Class of 2012. And as MetaEzra first reported two weeks ago, Cornell experienced a record number of applications this year as 32,655 applied for freshman admission. Over at the Sun, Julie Geng has projected an overall admissions rate of 18 percent this year. But here at MetaEzra, we'll go one decimal point further in our projection. Assuming a regular admissions cycle yield of 36%, Cornell will have to accept 5,160 applicants to fill the roughly 1,860 spots in an entering class of 3,000. (1,142 early decision students have already been admitted to the University.) This would bring us to a projected overall acceptance rate of 19.3%, with a 17.5% regular decision rate. As this is the peak year of the echo boom generation, it remains to be seen whether Cornell will be able to sustain these numbers. We're not holding our breath. More importantly, it remains to be seen whether or not the Class of 2012 will be the most talented class that Cornell has admitted. As we have espoused before, acceptance rates tell us nothing about the quality of the entering class. For the time being, Cornell's falling SAT scores seem to have stabilized: 67 and 83 percent of the Class of 2011 had SAT scores greater than 650 on the Verbal and Math sections of the test, respectively. Update: The New York Times is running an article today that collates application data from top schools across the country. In terms of percentage increases, Cornell falls right in the middle of the pack, ahead of peers like Duke, Penn, Columbia and Virginia, but behind places like Harvard, Amherst, and Northwestern. Cornell's own Doris Davis is also quoted in the article regarding the source of Cornell's applicants: California, for example, has become a bigger source of applicants for Cornell since the upstate New York university created a West Coast regional office in Los Angeles several years ago. “Ten years ago, California was not among our top eight feeder states,” said Doris Davis, an associate provost at Cornell. “Now it is among our top five.” Cornell applications rose 8 percent.
The reasons for the swelling numbers — not all colleges have reported yet — go beyond the growth in the college age population and the preoccupation with name-brand schools. Recruiting by elite colleges among low- and middle-income students and in new regions are bringing in more applications.
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