Admissions statistics indicate that Georgetown University may be gaining in popularity.

Nearly 49 percent of accepted students have chosen to enroll in next year’s freshman class, up from 41 percent last year. As a result, the university will be unlikely to admit any students from the waitlist for the first time in nearly 30 years.

Of the nearly 940 students offered early admission, 61 percent, about 600, accepted admission. The enrollment rate, or yield, stood at 37 percent last year when the university welcomed 450 out of the 1150 early applicants who were accepted.

Admissions officials said, however, that the trend is more likely the result of changes to early admissions policies by peer institutions than anything else.

This year, Yale and Stanford moved from a binding early decision program, which requires applicants to commit to the university if they are accepted, to a non-binding, “single-choice” early action system that allows applicants to apply early only to the single institution but then offers them the chance to wait until May 1 to accept or reject admission.

Harvard followed suit, moving from a “multi-choice” early action program – which allows early applicants to apply to any number of early action programs, the system currently in place at Georgetown – to the “single-choice” system adopted by Yale and Stanford.

The restrictions on early applicants led to a 25 percent decline in early action applications at Georgetown, said Charles Deacon, dean of undergraduate admissions.

“What this shows us is the influence of a very few institutions on each other,” he said.

Georgetown expected to receive fewer early applications, which would in turn lower the total number of applications. This would then prompt the university to accept a larger percentage of the applicants, Deacon said.

While Georgetown will not be overenrolled – the university usually has a larger waitlist and smaller accepted applicant pool because an enrollment cap by the District of Columbia requires the university to be more cautious – the high response rate will make it difficult for the university to enroll students who have been waitlisted.

Deacon said that the university admitted nearly 120 students off of the waitlist last year, but that it will be unlikely to admit any waitlisted students.

“Thank God we do have that enrollment cap that keeps us more conservative, because we would have been in trouble if we had admitted any more,” he said.

Deacon said that he expects to have an incoming class of about 1,530 – which does not count the 70 students that usually drop or defer their admission – which is slightly higher than the 1,505 goal for the class of 2008.

“So we will have a few more freshmen and a few less transfers this year,” he added.

Deacon strongly advocated the “multi-choice” early action program that Georgetown uses because it benefits students, not the admissions office.

The changes made by Yale, Stanford and Harvard defied the National Association for College Admission Counseling, which does not allow “single-choice” early action programs. Rather than punish the three elite universities, however, NACAC has formed a committee to review and reform all types of early admission.

While Harvard also saw a drop in their applicant pool because of the change, Deacon said that Harvard’s bending of the rules inevitably hurts Georgetown.

“We overlap with Harvard and we lose a lot of applicants to Harvard,” he said. “Now the question is, what’s going to happen next year? We believe that our early action system is the best, the most fair.”