Admissions: One in Sixty

We’ve all seen the ominous headlines: “record-breaking” number of applications and “new low” acceptance rates. For applicants, it’s as if every year the ceiling keeps inching higher and higher out of reach. With over 30,000 students applying to Harvard, college admissions can feel more like a labyrinth than a marathon—one in which the odds are overwhelmingly against your finding the egress. This year, out of every 14 students who applied to Harvard, just 1 was admitted. An article in The Washington Post recently asked if this meant that 1 in every 50 seniors in the country applied to Harvard.

So did 1 in 50 seniors actually apply to Harvard? According to the admissions office, the 30,000-strong applicant pool for Harvard’s Class of 2014—give or take a few hundred—does not include transfer applicants. Repeated (second or multiple-time applicants) can be ignored because they are nearly negligible in number. From this pool, around 5,000 are international citizens. Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 said these 5,000 students were “foreign by citizenship but any number may have applied from the United States.”

Using ballpark figures from the 2009 State of College Admissions report by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, we can estimate that there were 1.5 million applicants to four-year colleges and universities this year.

So, we can say with reasonable certainty—and this back-of-the-envelope calculation is certainly not meant to be definitive—that with 25,000 domestic applicants to Harvard, out of 1.5 million applicants in the country, approximately one in 60 of these individuals applied to Harvard this year. For us, these odds are a strong case for humility.

This post has been revised to reflect the following clarification and correction:

CLARIFICATION: April 12, 2010

An earlier version of the April 10 post "Admissions: One in Sixty" stated that one in 60 of "high school seniors" applied to Harvard this year. To clarify, these "high school seniors" were part of the pool of 1.5 million applicants in the country and not representative of the entire population of high school seniors in the nation.

CORRECTION: April 12, 2010

The post also incorrectly attributed information about the applicant pool to Byerly Hall. In fact, the admissions office is no longer located in Byerly Hall, but in the Cronkhite Center.