University of Pennsylvania Early Decision Class of 2022 Statistics

The University of Pennsylvania had another banner Early Decision cycle (photo credit: Bryan Y.W. Shin)

In the Early Decision round at the University of Pennsylvania, 18.5% of applicants earned admission to be members of the UPenn Class of 2022. In all, 7,074 students made binding commitments to the University of Pennsylvania this Early Decision cycle, marking an increase of 15% from last year’s applicant pool. And the admission rate marked the lowest admit rate to date in the Early Decision round for Ben Franklin’s school. If it sounds like you’ve read about UPenn setting a record in the Early Decision round recently, you must be a regular reader of our blog. UPenn set a record for its lowest admission rate in the Early Decision round just last year — at 22%. The previous record? The year before for the Class of 2020 with a 23.1% ED admit rate. And it was a record the year before that too, for the Class of 2019 with a 23.9% admit rate. Notice a trend? We do, we do!

Congratulations to our students at Ivy Coach who earned admission this Early Decision cycle to the University of Pennsylvania! Every last one of you who applied in the Early round to be members of the Class of 2022 got in. That’s right. Every. Last. One of you. We couldn’t be happier for you all! Mazel tov!

Breakdown of the UPenn Class of 2022 Early Decision Admits

Among admitted students to the University of Pennsylvania’s Class of 2022, 25% are legacies, a child or grandchild of a Penn alum. While the University of Pennsylvania’s Dean of Admissions Eric Furda regularly tops Ivy Coach’s ranking of most forthright admissions czars, if you ask us, this statistic should make Anderson Cooper’s “Ridiculist.” One out of four admitted students is the son, daughter, or grandchild of a Penn grad…and the school is touting this statistic in the infographic within their press release, as though it’s something they’re proud of? Oy vey is right. While we’ve been calling for an end to legacy admission for some time, we’ve raised our voices this year as our U.S. Department of Justice attacks the practice of Affirmative Action. It should be the practice of legacy admission that our U.S. Department of Justice attacks — not the practice of offering preferential treatment to underrepresented minority applicants.

But we digress. 11% of admitted students will be the first in their families to attend college. Now that’s a statistic the University of Pennsylvania should be proud of! If only 25% of admitted students were first generation and 11% were legacies — if only! That would be the day. 43% of admits to UPenn’s Class of 2022 are students of color, which includes Asian American and Asian applicants. 52% of the class is female. One in eight students are non-U.S. citizens or permanent residents. And admits hail from 45 states and 54 nations (fewer states than for the Early Decision admits last year at UPenn but more countries!). As Dean Furda expressed in a piece on the Class of 2022 Early Decision admits by Sarah Fortinsky for “The Daily Pennsylvanian”: “It does not appear that travel bans and immigration legislation has impacted Penn’s applicant pool.” Well said!

UPenn’s Dean of Admissions Eric Furda attributes the record-breaking number of ED applications in large part to higher scores for students on the newly designed SAT. But as we are quoted in UPenn’s newspaper, “The dramatic drop in the ED acceptance rate appears to not simply be a result of the rSAT, according to Brian Taylor, managing director at the college consulting firm Ivy Coach. ‘This is a record year in terms of the admission rate being 18.5 percent,’ Taylor said. ‘I would give more credit to Eric Furda than he’s giving to himself. Every one of these schools is impacted by this SAT and they would all have better numbers, but Penn’s numbers are drastically better this year.'”

The Early Decision Advantage at UPenn

In recent years, UPenn has filled about 55% of its class with Early Decision admits. Look for that statistic to be no different for the Class of 2022. So for you Regular Decision applicants, yes, that means that there are only about 45% of the seats in the incoming class left to fill. In spite of the fact that one out of every four applicants admitted is a legacy, in spite of the Early Decision pool at every highly selective college being filled with athletic recruits, there is an overwhelming advantage to applying Early. For all. And anything you hear otherwise, well, it’s nonsense. Think about it. The folks who argue against the Early Decision advantage cite the number of legacies and recruited athletes in the Early pool. They’re not wrong.

But they fail to express that it’s more competitive in the Regular Decision round. And if the Early Decision pool is filled with privileged applicants as they assert, well, then where are all of the underrepresented minorities coming from? Based on their own argument, those students are in the Regular Decision round…making it even more competitive for a student who is not an underrepresented minority to earn admission. And those students with perfect grades and perfect or near-perfect test scores who didn’t get into Harvard in the Early Action round? They’ll be in the UPenn Regular Decision pool, too.