This past November, one hundred and thirty four seniors, sixty one percent of the Class of 2007, submitted either Early Decision I or Early Action applications to colleges. About forty-eight percent of these students, representing one-third of the senior class, were accepted. According to Dean Jacoby, Head of the College Counseling Office and a graduate of the class of ‘88, “the number of accepts this year.was a good deal higher than it was last year.Forty percent of students who applied to Ivies got in this year.which is within the range of what is a reasonable expectation, but at the high end of that.”

Despite the high admit rate of Choate students early, many in the community have adopted critical perspectives regarding these numbers or do not analyze them with enough depth to fully understand their meaning, Jacoby explained.

According to Jacoby, with a poor understanding as to what these numbers mean, students often jump to conclusions or make assumptions regarding their own imminent application; one example he gave was of an uneducated “Student X,” who saw that Princeton only admitted four students in both regular and early pools from the class of 2006 from a pool of twenty-one Choate applicants. This student might deduct from this information that they do not stand a chance at admission to Princeton. In making that conclusion, Jacoby said, “Student X” did not take into consideration the admissions statistics for the class of 2005 to Princeton, in which only two people were admitted from a Choate applicant pool of nineteen. If the two years are viewed comparatively, the class of 2006 had twice the number of students coming from a larger pool of applicants than in 2005. Jacoby believes it is unfair to look exclusively at one year’s admissions stats without comparing it to previous years’ as it distorts a student’s view of a school. One sixth former who preferred to remain anonymous corroborated Mr. Jacoby’s ideas, saying, “While we know that it’s not right or fair to make assumptions from Early Decisions results, we definitely tend to make inferences from what we hear from classmates, rather than taking the big picture into account.”

Choate’s class of 2007 early admissions decisions come with many considerations that, according to Jacoby, the uninformed student would jump to, making this year’s result seem only meager in comparison to last year’s. One key component to understanding this year’s results, he went on to say, is that the class of 2007 is almost thirty students less than the class of 2006. Without this information, it would appear that this year’s early admit number is significantly lower than last year’s. In reality, the numbers are relatively the same.

Additionally, Jacoby said, more and more students are applying early each year as colleges grow increasingly more selective. Mr. Jacoby illustrated this point by providing a comparison between the admit rates of colleges while he attended Choate compared to the admit rates of colleges in the present. “When I was a student here, I went to Bates, and Bates had a forty six or forty seven acceptance rate, which was one of the top fifty most selective schools. There weren’t a lot of schools that accepted less than fifty percent, and Columbia accepted about twenty five percent. Last year, if you wanted to go to Bates, Bates’ acceptance rate was twenty five percent and Columbia’s was eleven or twelve, which is to say, today if I wanted to go to Bates, I would need an Ivy League qualification from when I was here.” Although only a few students may be accepted into a certain school, it may be an increase over the number taken the previous year. If this information is not considered, according to Mr. Jacoby, the success of this year’s early pool could be distorted. Mr. Jacoby commented on the distortion that can occur with early acceptances, saying “Early can really give you strange messages, where you think everything’s great or everything’s terrible, and you look at the whole class and realize, ‘Oh, what we thought we were seeing from early didn’t apply to the entire class’. We still have two thirds of the class who are going to be getting decisions and making responses, and so there’s a whole bunch of stuff that can be different later on.” One example he gave of such a school is the University of Pennsylvania, which accepted no students from Choate’s early pool for 2006, but in the overall admissions scheme, more students matriculated to Penn than the year before.

Another factor that plays an increasing role in where students choose to apply early, Jacoby explained, is the size of endowment of the school. While this may seem inconsequential when choosing where to apply, college endowments in general are increasing, meaning that colleges can hire better teachers, improve facilities, and offer more challenging courses.

A list of the market value of all American college endowments was recently published in the January issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education is a good illustration of this point. The market value of each endowment is equivalent to the money each college has not designated for spending on specific things; most endowments include specific budgets and are much higher, but in actuality do not portray how much excess money a school has to do whatever it wants with, as demonstrated with the market value. The document demonstrated that while Princeton may have a larger overall endowment, the University of Texas’ market value of its endowment ranked higher than Princeton’s. According to Jacoby, market value endowments prove that prestige does not always equate large amounts of “spending money,” as schools like Brown, Williams, and Tufts have market value endowments significantly lower than those of schools like the University of Minnesota, Rice University, and Texas A&M. Schools just as difficult to gain acceptance to as Ivies also have rising market value endowments, as Northwestern, Emory, and the University of Virginia have all had endowments rise over the past year.

Overall, rising endowments, along with other factors, have led to students applying to schools they felt were a better fit for them and not necessarily the most prestigious schools. According to Mr. Jacoby, this year many students opted to apply for schools just as good as and with the same standards as Ivies but with a fifteen or eighteen percent acceptance rate instead of six or ten percent.

The class of 2007 has accomplished a major feat, with one third of a class of two hundred and twenty students gaining admission early. But as admit rates decline and applications pour in to colleges in numbers previously unheard of, the class of 2008 can only hope to achieve the same success as their predecessors.