Though other schools in the Ivy League boasted lower acceptance rates and more applicants, Dartmouth's four percent acceptance rate decrease and 15 percent increase in applications constituted the largest such changes in the Ancient Eight this year.
Harvard, however, again received the largest number of applications in the Ivies, with 20,986 students applying for admission. The nearly 21,000 applications represents a record for the school, and the first time the number has been over 20,000. It also continues a trend over the last 13 years in which the school has seen applications increase 12 of those 13 years.
Coming close behind, Yale reported an 11.4 percent acceptance rate and Brown's was around 15 percent, both record lows. Cornell, the only other Ivy reporting, came in at 31 percent. Princeton, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania have not yet released their official numbers.
Dartmouth's acceptance rate was also a record low, reaching 17.5 percent overall, with just 16 percent of regular applications receiving acceptance letters.
For Brown, it was the first year the school has pursued a need-blind admissions policy. The result, according to Director of Admission Michael Goldberger was a six percent increase in the number of students receiving financial aid.
Goldberger said the philosophical impact of need-blind admission was of primary importance. Brown admission officers were no longer restrained by practical concerns for the university, and were able to pursue the most able and diverse student body possible. Goldberger described the goal of the admissions office as trying "to get the very best kids here and for money not to be a factor."
The other change common in the Ivy League this year was the methodological switch to online decision letters. Last year some schools, including Yale, chose to post decision letters on a website beginning the morning the paper letters were mailed. Other schools, such as Harvard, and this year, Dartmouth, chose to send out emails that day. However, both approaches led to complaints by high schools that students were bogging down the Internet by checking their email or the decision web page during school hours every five minutes.
To solve the problem, Harvard chose to send its decision emails out between 5 and 9 p.m. on April 2 instead of in the morning as was done last year. Yale did not stipulate a time that the web page would be functional for students, hoping to spread out the hits over the course of the day. The site went functional around 6 p.m. on April 2.
"The reason we did it was because last year when we went live in the morning, in every library, every classroom that had computers, the kids were logging on," Yale Dean of Admissions Richard Shaw said. "We got a lot of criticism for going live during the school day."
Dartmouth's emails this year went out on Friday, April 4, two days after the paper letters were mailed.
