Dean of Admissions Eric Furda leads the staff in charge of handling the thousands of applications Penn has received. | DP File Photo
Penn’s overall acceptance rate fell to 9.4 percent this year, the lowest in the University’s history.
At 5 p.m., regular decision applicants to the Class of 2020 will view their decisions via an online portal. Penn received 38,918 applications this year, the most in the University’s history, and 3,661 students were admitted. This is the third year in a row that Penn’s acceptance rate has been below 10 percent, though this year it fell from the 9.9 percent acceptance rate of the previous two years.
Admitted students hail from all 50 states, as well as Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and Guam. Pennsylvania had the highest number of admitted students with 542 total — 172 of whom are Philadelphia residents — followed by New York, which had 422 accepted applicants, and California with 393. Eighty-eight countries are also represented in the pool of admitted students for the Class of 2020, with 14 percent of students coming from high schools abroad, a small drop from last year's 15 percent.
Forty-eight percent of the incoming class identified themselves as members of U.S. minority groups on their applications, up from the 45 percent who self-identified last year.
Thirteen percent of the Class of 2020 are the first in their family to go to college. Meanwhile, 14 percent of the admitted students have a parent or grandparent who attended Penn.
1,332 students had previously been admitted through the Early Decision program, filling up 54.6 percent of the incoming class. Penn plans to have a total class of 2,445 students across the School of Nursing, the Wharton School, the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the College of Arts and Sciences.
“My excitement about this class is kind of the unknown," Dean of Admissions Eric Furda said. "I can say, well, this is what the Class of 2020 looks like, but what is it going to become — I don’t have the answer to that. I know academically, I know with their interests, I know with what they conveyed about what they saw in the Penn community, whether they say yes to us or not, that they recognize that there’s a unique opportunity here for them. So I’m excited for it.”
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