The wait is now over for the 19,170 applicants hoping to be members of Duke's Class of 2011.
Acceptance decisions were made available online Wednesday evening, and letters will be mailed to applicants today.
The University accepted 3,770 applicants in total to be a part of next year's freshman class, including the 470 accepted early decision in December, bringing the overall acceptance rate to 19.7 percent-one of the lowest in recent years and down from last year's 21.2 percent.
Duke's initial 2006 acceptance rate was approximately 19 percent, but it ultimately rose with the number of students accepted from the waitlist, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Christoph Guttentag said.
Guttentag noted that every year the University intends to accept a certain number of applicants off its waitlist.
The Office of Undergraduate Admissions said it intends to enroll a class of 1,665 students to matriculate in the fall.
Overall, Guttentag said he was pleased with the strength of this year's applicant pool.
"Academically, it's on par-it's not dramatically stronger, it's not weaker, it's very similar to what we've seen in past years," he said.
Beyond academics, Guttentag said the pool was one of the most unique groups of applicants he has seen in recent years.
"It strikes me as a more interesting group of students, maybe a little more diverse-diverse in the sense of their interests, their activities," he said.
The number of applicants to Trinity College of Arts and Sciences reached a record high at 16,132. Records were also broken this year for the number of black, Hispanic and Asian and Asian-American applicants, reaching highs of 2,190, 1,303 and 5,173 applications, respectively. A record number of international students, 2,292, also applied this year-an increase of 13 percent from the previous year.
The most significant drop occurred among applicants to the Pratt School of Engineering, Guttentag said.
"It was a drop of a couple of hundred-it was a noticeable decline," he said.
Guttentag said there were no clear trends in the drop of Pratt applicants, but added that admissions would further analyze the data in coming months.
He said he expects overall yield to increase from last year's 40 to 41 percent due in part to the admissions office's more proactive approach to recruitment.
Last year's yield had dipped slightly because of the ongoing lacrosse case, which Guttentag said should not play as large a role in this year's applicants' decisions.
"The [lacrosse] coverage was at its maximum right in the month of April, and I think there were some students who were trying to decide who were affected by all of that coverage," he said. "I think that the students applying this year have decided to apply having already processed all that information."
This year's applicant pool also saw new records in the number of applicants from North and South Carolina and applicants who were the children of alumni. As in previous years, North Carolina was the top state for admitted students.
Duke extended offers of admission to only 43 percent of the 1,381 valedictorians who applied. The University also admitted 58 percent of the more than 1,300 applicants who had combined SAT scores of 1,550 in the math and verbal sections.
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