Georgetown accepted 16.9 percent of its early action applicants for the Class of 2015, down over two percentage points from last year’s early acceptance rate of 19.1 percent. The decrease in offers of admission follows a 9 percent rise in the number of early applicants.
Overall, 1,122 of 6,654 candidates will receive offers of admission this week. In November, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Charles Deacon had estimated that 19 percent of applicants would be admitted early this admissions cycle.
The number of applicants the university accepts in the early pool is based on how many admissions offers the university plans to issue over the course of both the early and regular cycles, Deacon said.
According to Deacon, Georgetown always admits the same percentage or lower during the early action pool as in the regular admission pool. The university will admit approximately 20 percent of applicants in total. About 15 percent of those deferred during the early action process will ultimately be accepted for the 2010-2011 school year, he said.
The School of Foreign Service admitted the highest percentage of applicants with 19.4 percent, while the College was the only undergraduate school to admit less than the university average with 15.9 percent. The School of Nursing and Health Studies admitted 18.2 percent of applicants and the McDonough School of Business admitted 16.9 percent.
According to Deacon, the crop of students admitted early exhibited great academic talent.
“This is going to be the leading part of the class probably,” Deacon said.
The students admitted from the early pool averaged above the 97th percentile of their high school class and the middle 50 percent had a score of 680 to 780 on both the mathematics and critical reading sections of the SAT. Average SAT writing and ACT scores were not available.
The Office of Undergraduate Admissions could not supply specific data concerning ethnicity, geographic region or economic status of admitted students.
“[Geography], ethnicity, et cetera, is reported when all applications are in for the regular pool as these vary more widely from early to regular and so are not meaningful until final data allows us to compare year to year,” Deacon said.
The admissions office waits until after the regular cycle to publish specific demographic data, but Deacon said that the early action pool is generally less diverse than the regular decision one.
“Tendency to apply early is greater [on] the East Coast and probably if you attend a private high school,” Deacon said. “Although this pool was quite diverse in minority numbers, the more affluent tend to be the majority of the population that [applies] early.”
Deacon predicted that about 550 to 600 of students admitted early will enroll in the university this fall.
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