Penn admitted 1,279 students to its Class of 2023 through the Early Decision Program in December. The newly accepted students made up just 18 percent of the applicant pool — Penn's lowest ED acceptance rate to date.
But Penn was not alone in its decision to admit a lower percentage of students through ED this year. Every Ivy League school that has released its early admissions data saw declines in their early acceptances compared to the previous year. Columbia University is the only Ivy that has yet to release its ED numbers.
Penn had the smallest decline in selectivity. The University's ED admissions rate decreased by only 0.55 percentage points from 18.55 percent. The small change comes just one year after Penn had the most drastic decline among the Ivies, tapering early admissions by 3.5 percentage points.
As Penn's admit rate drops, the ED applicant pool continues to grow. Despite this, Dean of Admissions Eric Furda said Penn cannot accept more early decision students than it already does.
Brown University had the largest decline in ED admission rate compared to last year, boasting an 18 percent rate of admission for the Class of 2023, which is 3.1 percentage points lower than last year’s class. Dartmouth College experienced the second largest decrease, a 1.69 percentage point drop from the previous year. Cornell University had a similar drop of 1.66 percentage points from the Class of 2022.
At 13.2 percent, Yale University reported the lowest rate of early admission among the Ivy League, beating out Harvard University, which has been the most competitive university for the past two years.
For Penn's incoming Class of 2023, legacy students represented a significant portion of students admitted, with 23 percent of admitted students having a parent or grandparent who attended Penn. This was a slight decline from last year, which saw 25 percent of admits who were legacies.
Across the four Ivy League institutions that reported the figure – Penn, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Cornell – Penn had the highest percentage of accepted legacy students.
About 48 percent of Penn’s Class of 2023 also self-identify as people of color or with a minority group. The proportion of admitted people of color was higher at Harvard and Princeton, where 49.2 and 50 percent of early admits self-identified as people of color, respectively.
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