It has been a very good year for the Ivy League -- applications were up for most schools, and admissions rates were down almost across the board, although Dartmouth remained stuck in the middle of the pack with little change from last year.
Brown University experienced the biggest increase in applications, up 14 percent from last year. The University of Pennsylvania saw the next-biggest jump in applications flooding into the mailroom, up over 6 percent from 1999.
Harvard and Brown Universities saw their rate of admission drop to an all-time low of 10.9 percent and just over 15 percent respectively.
Penn saw their acceptance rate drop 17 percent to about 22 percent.
Dartmouth was one of three schools which saw fewer applications and one of two with slightly higher acceptance rates.
Dartmouth offered admission to about 21.4 percent of applicants this year. The only two Ivy schools with higher rates of acceptance were the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University, with rates of approximately 23 percent and 30 percent respectively.
Dartmouth's acceptance rate was up slightly from 20.8 percent in 1999--a 0.6 point difference that Dean of Admissions Karl Furstenberg deemed "insignificant."
The College received applications from 10,165 students this year, marking a slight decrease from last year's total of 10,260.
Furstenberg attributed declines in admittance rates at some of the other Ivies to higher rates of early admission.
"Some schools have substantially increased the number [of applicants] they admit early ... If you take more students early, that pushes the admittance rate down because early decision [matriculation rates] are 100 percent," he said.
According to Furstenberg, the percentage of applicants admitted under the early decision process at the Dartmouth has remained constant at around 35 percent over the past several years.Furstenberg also noted that Dartmouth has increased this year's incoming class size by 25 students.
Princeton University experienced a notably larger decrease in applicants, with 8 percent fewer students applying this year. Princeton's acceptance rate also rose slightly, from 11.4 percent in 1999 to the current rate of 12.2 percent.
The acceptance rate for Yale University went down -- although slightly -- despite this year's three percent decrease in applicants.
Sometimes, increases in applications can be due to university initiatives, such as enhancing financial aid opportunities. Other times, the increases can have more to do with external factors.
"I'm assuming it has to do with the increasing popularity of New York," Amy Siemens, a representative of the admissions office at Columbia University said of the larger number of applications to the university this year.
