With orientation only a week away for the Class of 2014 and students already arriving in Ithaca for awesome pre-orientation programs like Outdoor Odyssey, nee Wilderness Reflections, MetaEzra recently came across some statistics for the entering class. And with this year's low acceptance rate and high yield, we knew that the Class of 2014 was bound to impress. The big news is that this appears to be the strongest year in recent memory, not only on the acceptance rate and yield side, but also on the academic caliber side. The later is much more important, because acceptance rates don't really tell you anything about the strength of the entering class:
| Percent of entering class with SAT scores greater than 650 | |||
| Verbal | Math | ||
| Class of 2008 | 69 | 83 | |
| Class of 2009 | 67 | 82 | |
| Class of 2010 | 66 | 81 | |
| . . . | |||
| Class of 2013 | 67 | 82 | |
| Class of 2014 | 70 | 85 | |
This may, in fact, be the first time that more than 70 percent of the entering class had a Verbal SAT greater than 650.
On the flip side of things, however, we understand that entering black students plummeted this year, from 6.7% (216) to 5.3% (172), which is almost a 25 percent drop in black students. This is sure to cause some consternation in Day Hall given the amount of attention this number gets every year. One speculation is that the drop in matriculating blacks may be a result of the suicide cluster, as black students may be more sensitive to the perceived amount of student support on campus.
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine whether or not there is a link between the SAT scores going up and black matriculates going down.
The other big headline is that the percentage of international students declined substantially, from 10.5 to 7.7 percent of the class. One has to wonder if the decision to re-allocate financial aid for Canadian students might not have played a role in that change.
At least we're still going to have a kick-ass woman's hockey team this year, complete with three new Canadians, and one returning Olympic gold-medal winner.
