Yield Remains High for Class of 2011

Nearly four-fifths of the students who were offered a place in the Class of 2011 have agreed to matriculate, putting Harvard’s much-watched admissions yield at a percentage nearly identical to last year’s. And this spring, wait-listed students lucked out.

According to figures released by the undergraduate admissions office yesterday, 1,630 of the 2,058 students who were offered the chance to matriculate next fall accepted it. The College is aiming for a class of 1,662 students, meaning that about 30 wait-listed applicants will also be offered admission. Last spring, slightly more students accepted admission than Harvard had expected, and only a handful on the wait list were subsequently offered spots.

In percentage terms, this year’s 79.2 percent admissions yield matches up with last year’s figure of 79.8 percent, continuing to hover near 80 percent as it has for the past few years, according to Dean of Admissions William R. Fitzsimmons ’67.

“This time of year, I seem to say the same things about the class we’ve just admitted...every year through the work of a lot of people...we’re able to assemble these amazing classes,” Fitzsimmons said. “We as an institution should feel very fortunate.”

Harvard’s rate tends to be well above that of other highly selective institutions. Last year, Princeton and Stanford both reported yields of 69 percent, and Yale’s yield was 71 percent.

The statistics released yesterday seem to reinforce the notion that academic politics have little to do with where most students decide to go to college. The contrast between how Harvard fared in the media this spring and last could hardly be greater: in February 2006, while high school seniors were gearing up to pick their future school, Harvard’s president resigned after a protracted battle with Faculty of Arts and Sciences professors that made headlines around the world; this February, the national press largely cast Harvard in a rosy glow after the University selected its first woman president in its 371-year history. And yet, the admissions yield figures for 2007 and 2006 were separated by just six-tenths of a percent.

According to Fitzsimmons, students usually attribute their choice to come to Harvard to a few defining factors—the eminence of the faculty, the excellence and diversity of the student body, the school’s location in the Cambridge-Boston area, and the range of resources available in terms of laboratories, libraries, and other facilities.

“It’s very hard to find something inthe world that you can’t do here—academically or in terms of the extracurricular environment,” Fitzsimmons said in an interview.

The admissions office points to the expansion of the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative (HFAI)—which will cover about 25 percent of the incoming class—as well as extensive recruiting efforts as major factors in the College’s high yield rates.

The College expanded HFAI this year, making a Harvard education free for students whose families make less than $60,000 and lessening the required contribution for families that make between $60,000 and $80,000.

With the end of the Early Action program next fall, the admissions office will be expanding its recruiting efforts in the months of November and December both in the United States and abroad, Fitzsimmons said. He added that recruiting for next year’s class has already begun—this being the second week of a three week, 60-city tour by admissions officials.

One of the students accepted off of the wait-list this week was Emma W. Wood, a senior from Phillips Academy. She said she had applied Early Action to Harvard, was deferred and then waitlisted during regular admissions period. In the interim months, she sent extra letters of recommendation to the admissions office.

“I had kind of convinced myself that I didn’t really want to go to a school that didn’t seem to want me,” she said in a phone interview from Andover. But when she found out that she had gotten in, she said, she was “ecstatic”—“I definitely wanted to go.”

—Staff writer Aditi Balakrishna can be reached at balakris@fas.harvard.edu.