By INDU RAMESH

June 9, 2010

Although Duke received 11.6 percent more applications for admission this year, the yield for the Class of 2014 remained roughly the same as the year before.

Approximately 42 percent of the 3,372 students admitted to the University accepted their offer of admission, Director of Undergraduate Admissions Christoph Guttentag said. Last year, the Class of 2013 had a yield of 41.5 percent.

“We expected the yield to remain steady,” Guttentag said. “We did not expect a big move in either direction.”

As the admissions office tries to finalize the freshman class, Duke will take roughly 100 students from the waitlist by mid-June, on-par with last year’s waitlist admissions. Two thousand of the 3,382 students waitlisted decided to stay on the waitlist, Guttentag said.

This year’s waitlist was 30 to 40 percent larger than last year’s, primarily to give admissions more flexibility in a year with a record number of applications, Guttentag added. The University received 26,694 applications for the Class of 2014, the most in University history.

“We were pressed time-wise, and by the time we got to the end of the admissions cycle... we had to prioritize certain things,” Guttentag said. “Typically what we do near the end, we go back to the tentatively waitlisted students and ask, ‘Who among these students should we actually deny admission to?’ [We] didn’t have time to do both that and completely analyze the class we were accepting.”

Guttentag said he understands the frustration of students still waiting to hear from admissions for a final decision, but added that in most cases students would prefer to be placed on a waitlist than outright denied. A larger waitlist also has the advantage of rounding out an incoming class, he said.

Next year, Guttentag said he would like to have a smaller waitlist and will have more admissions officers reading applications to meet his office’s growing demands. The system that Guttentag inherited 18 years ago was designed for an application pool of about half the current size, he noted.

Guttentag said he views the increase in applications as a part of a larger phenomenon and noted that some of Duke’s peers also saw significant increases in applications.

Duke’s yield remains lower than that of a number of its peer institutions. Both Harvard University and Stanford University reported yields of more than 70 percent, according to the New York Times. Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University reported yields of 55, 63 and 49 percent, respectively.

Despite the strain that an increase in applications causes at Duke, Guttentag said he was satisfied with the most recent admissions cycle.

“I am pleased that in two years of the worst economy this country has seen in decades, our applications have increased over 30 percent,” he said. “More than anything, that is the a testament to the value of a Duke education.... I would rather have too many applications than too few.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=1336361&forum_id=1#15226678)

http://duke.listserv.org/threads/view/532#1501

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=1336361&forum_id=1#15231453)