It's like the limbo for Ivy League admissions rates - they just keep going lower and lower.
Five other Ivy League schools joined Penn in admitting the lowest rates of applicants yet, but experts say Penn has the best chance to keep the momentum going.
Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown and Columbia universities all joined Penn by accepting record-low percentages of applicants.
Yale University increased by 0.7 percent, and Cornell University has not yet released its admissions data.
Chuck Hughes, president and founder of Road to College and a former Harvard admissions official, said he was impressed with Penn's steadily declining acceptance rate - as recent as five years ago, the rate was at 25 percent - and expected it to continue to drop.
"The reality is that Penn is going through the most decisive decrease" of all the Ivy League schools, he said.
Penn Dean of Admissions Lee Stetson attributes the steadily falling acceptance rate to the combination of increased yield and the rising number of applications received.
But Hughes believes it is Penn's larger size and urban environment that has made the school increasingly attractive to prospective students.
"Cornell and Dartmouth always will have to compete with the 'I don't want to be in Hanover or Ithaca,'" he said.
As for the other Ivies, Harvard, Princeton and Yale accepted under 10 percent of applicants, marking the first time all three schools broke into single digits in the same year.
But Howard Green, a former Princeton University admissions officer and president of Howard Green and Associates, said he doesn't expect the decrease to continue, simply because it is much harder to continue to accept such a small percentage of applicants.
"The numbers can't get too much lower," he said.
Another factor to consider going forward is the elimination of early admissions practices by both Harvard and Princeton, beginning next year.
But Green said the change will likely have a negligible effect on Harvard's admissions rates due to its high yield - the measure of how many accepted students matriculate to the school - which hovers at about 80 percent.
Green predicted that Princeton - which usually has a yield of about 70 percent - may not escape the same fate.
"It will not be an enormous surge," he said, "but they may need to admit somewhat more."
Overall, Green said the continuing decreases across the board can likely be attributed to the growing number of students who apply to several top schools - a trend that might be tough on officials during admissions season.
"Soon there will not be any meat left on the skeleton of the admissions people," he said.
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