It's the envelope some high school seniors have been waiting for all their lives, and for 3,295 Duke regular decision applicants last week, the envelope was satisfyingly thick.
In what officials call one of the strongest applicant pools in history, the Office of Undergraduate Admissions has admitted 3,770 students to the Class of 2007, a slight increase over last year. With a record 16,705 applications this year, 22.5 percent of all applicants were admitted - 475 under binding early decision and 3,295 under non-binding regular decision, for which decisions were also made available online April 1.
The University hopes to fill about 1,630 spots, equivalent to a yield ratio of about 43.2 percent, which is consistent with previous years.
"Obviously I'm happy that we have a large and unusually strong applicant pool," said Director of Undergraduate Admissions Christoph Guttentag. "It ultimately brings a more talented group of students to Duke, not just academically but also in impact on the community, extracurricular accomplishments and quality as an applicant."
Guttentag said more aggressive recruiting and an additional staff member whose primary responsibility was concentrating on engineering applicants contributed to the high quality of admits. He added that the stronger pool could be a national trend.
"In my conversations with my colleagues at other colleges, it seems that this is not just a Duke phenomenon, but the nature of this particular class of high school students," he said.
Although the University has never released an average SAT score, Guttentag said that number increased by 11 points this year. He added that an analysis of the applicant rating system also demonstrates the applicant pool's growth.
To create a "summary sense of how strong an applicant is," the admissions office rates applicants on a 1 to 5 scale in each of six categories: grades and strength of curriculum, standardized testing, essays, extracurricular activities, letters of recommendation and interviews.
"Imagine the top 1,000 admits [by those ratings] from last year," Guttentag explained. "If you used the same qualifications, there are 1,200 of them [at the same level] this year.... [Thus,] there was a 20 percent increase in the top of our applicant pool."
Because of the "dramatically stronger" pool, Guttentag said Duke followed statistical models that suggested admitting a larger number of students.
"What we know is that the stronger an applicant overall, the more good choices that student is going to have in terms of college acceptances," Guttentag said. "The stronger they are, the lower the likelihood that they will enroll at Duke."
Duke's acceptance rate was higher than those of most of its peers, which feature smaller classes and higher applicant numbers. Harvard University was the lowest at 9.8 percent, with Yale University closely behind at 11.4 percent and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at 11.5 percent. Stanford University followed with a 12.1 percent admit rate and Brown University at 14.9 percent, while Dartmouth accepted 17.7 percent and Cornell, with a larger class size than most, accepted 24.4 percent of its total applicant pool.
Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University have not yet released their acceptance rates for regular decision.
For the first time, regular decision students were able to log on to the admissions website April 1 at 7 p.m. EST and find out whether they were accepted. Guttentag said the system ran smoothly, as it did for the early decision process, and more than three-quarters of the 10,000 applicants who registered on the website found out their results within the first 12 hours.
Another new feature this year is the waving for international students of the $200 deposit that admits pay to secure a spot in their class.
"We want to make it as easy as possible for students overseas to respond to our offer of admission. We are allowing them to fax their response over to us," Guttentag said. "The sooner they can start getting a visa to study here the better, because we noticed last year that it took significantly longer for non-citizens to get a visa last year than the year before."
A record 240 international students were accepted this year out of 1,400 applicants, also a record. Diversity and geographical distribution numbers will not be available until after May 1, when admits must notify Duke if they intend on matriculating in the fall. Guttentag predicted, though, that North Carolina would be strongest represented, with the Carolinas comprising 15 percent of the Class of 2007.
In addition, about 50 to 100 students could be taken off the waitlist allowing Guttentag's office to further "sculpt" the class, but that number has dropped to as low as 11 in recent years.
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