Georgetown will dip further into its waitlist this year to fill the incoming Class of 2012 after several peer universities cancelled their early admissions programs.

On Tuesday, Georgetown mailed its first waitlist acceptance letters, admitting 80 people from the waitlist to reach the target of 1,580 first-year students. Last year, 20 people were admitted from the waitlist; the year before that around 60 were; and the year before that about 10 were.

Deacon said that although the totals have fluctuated, Georgetown aims to keep the number of students accepted off the waitlist under 100 people.

“It’s not really consistent,” Deacon said. “But if you keep it under 100, then you know you’re getting most of your first-choice people.”

Harvard University, Princeton University and the University of Virginia – three universities that attract the same applicant pool as Georgetown – cancelled their early admission programs for this admissions cycle, which caused an increase in the number of undergraduate applications to Georgetown from 16,168 last year to 18,700 this year. These universities have also been taking more students off of their waitlists this year.

As a result of cancelled early admission programs and higher waitlist acceptance rates at other universities, Georgetown’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions expected the university’s yield this year to be lower.

“This is an unusual year because some of the top schools are accepting a lot more waitlist people than usual, so we will have to make adjustments if we lose people,” he said.

Deacon said that the increase in applicants and waitlist reliance was also due to a greater number of high school students applying to college. He said, though, that the cancellation of other universities’ early action programs likely played the biggest role.

“This is the kind of one-time jump that was more influenced by those programs than by the population,” he said.

For this reason, Georgetown will maintain an extended waitlist, which will continue until June 30.

Although Deacon predicted in January that the yield rate for non-waitlisted students would drop, he expects that the yield rate once the waitlisted students send in their decisions will be about the same as last year’s 48 percent.

“It’s a guessing game,” he said, “but it’s as good as we could have hoped for.”

The Office of Admissions will not have the final matriculation rate until all of the waitlist decisions are finalized later this summer.

Deacon said he expects the number of applicants next year to depend significantly on whether other schools drop their early admissions programs.

“By now, I think we would know if others had dropped their early programs,” he said.

“We’ll probably be in the same 18,000 to 19,000 game again next year,” he said about the number of undergraduate applicants. He added, though, that this year should be the peak of the number of high school students applying to college.

“This year is the official peak of the population, and this is the largest number of high school graduates we’ve seen, so it will begin a slow decline over the next year,” he said.

Despite the actions of its peer institutions, Deacon said Georgetown will continue to offer early admission.

“We didn’t accept more people than last year,” Deacon said, “but we knew we were going to lose more to Harvard, Princeton and other schools.”

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