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Ivy Leagues Post Record Low Admission Rates

Some Ivy League schools are posting some of the lowest admission rates on record, this year. Harvard for example only accepted 2,032 of the 34,302 students who applied. That's a 5.9 percent acceptance rate, which is a record low for the school.

The New York Times reports:

"Yale was also more selective this year. Its acceptance rate, 6.82 percent, was lower than the 7.35 percent admitted last year. Yale admitted 1,975 of its 28,974 applicants this year. Last year, the pool was smaller, with 27,282 students. An additional 1,001 students are on this year's waitlist. (If you've been waitlisted, here's a statistic: of the 996 waitlisted last year, Yale eventually accepted 103 of them.)

"At Princeton, the acceptance rate was 7.86 percent, a record low for the school. It offered admission to 2,095 students of the 26,664 who applied. Princeton officials called its applicant pool the second-largest in the university's history."

The Yale Daily News spoke to James Onwuachi, a college guidance counselor at Westminster Schools, a private school in Atlanta, who said the admission rates have been on their way down for years now.

"You couple the size of the high school age population that are seniors, along with the proliferation of online applications, and you expect that kind of selectivity," Onwuachi told the paper. "It's like an arms race."

CNN Money reports two Ivy Leagues actually saw their admission rate rise: Brown acceptted 9.6 percent of the applicants, while Columbia accepted 7.4 percent.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Eyder Peralta is NPR's East Africa correspondent based in Nairobi, Kenya.
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