Yale Early Action Admission Numbers

Single Choice Early Action applications to Yale are down this year from last year, albeit marginally.

Ivy Coach is featured today in an article of “The Yale Daily News” entitled “Early applications show increased diversity” written by Jon Victor. The article focuses on the Yale Early Action admission numbers for the Class of 2020. Early Action applications to Yale University were down slightly this year, with the school receiving 4,662 applications under their Single Choice Early Action policy. For the Class of 2019, Yale received 4,693 applications, representing as Victor writes “a marginal drop.”

What we happened to notice was that the Yale University press release was quite defensive about this marginal drop in applications. Indeed, the release reads: “As always, the Admissions Office is less interested in the total quantity of applications received, and is more interested in the quality of those applications and the diversity of backgrounds, experiences, and interests reflected in the pool.” Uh huh. Of course colleges like Yale care about recruiting a diverse class. But you can bet they also care about the number of applications they receive.

As we are quoted in the piece: “Brian Taylor, director of Ivy Coach, a New York-based college consulting firm, said the increased diversity of the pool shows that Yale’s outreach efforts to minority students have been effective. He also noted that a school’s early application numbers are important for college rankings such as the list published by U.S. News and World Report, which factors acceptance rate into its rankings. He pointed out that Yale’s early acceptance rate has increased in each of the last three years. The early acceptance rate for the class of 2017 was 14.4 percent, while for the class of 2019 it was 16.0 percent.” An increase in acceptance rate isn’t what Yale is aiming for, though it does seem they are making great strides at increasing the diversity of their class under the leadership of Jeremiah Quinlan.