The University has admitted 43 students into the Class of 2017 from the waitlist this year in its lowest number of acceptances from the waitlist since 2008.
Of the 43 accepted from the waitlist, 34 have chosen to attend Penn as members of this fall’s incoming freshman class. Another four have decided to take a gap year before attending the University.
Dean of Admissions Eric Furda attributes the lower waitlist acceptance numbers this year to assumptions made by the admissions office on historical admission data, and the fact that there weren’t any extraneous factors — such as increased waitlist movement and admissions policy changes at other schools — to impact the office’s assumptions.
“The reality is … we have historical data to help us try to project what our yield will be in a successive year,” Furda said. “We used the waitlist to make sure we covered the enrollment of each school and protected against what we call summer melt.”
When admissions decisions were released on March 28, 2,800 applicants were offered a spot on a waitlist. About 60 percent of those students chose to remain on the list.
After this year’s waitlisted students were accepted, a total of 3,828 students had been admitted to Penn this application cycle. Currently, there are 2,434 registered to attend the University — just 14 more than Furda’s target goal of 2,420.
“We looked at historical data, made assumptions about that data, used intuition and knowledge … and now we’re at this level [where we want to be],” Furda said.
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