Admissions

Bucking a Boastful Trend, Stanford Will No Longer Brag About Its Application Numbers

By Andy Thomason

August 30, 2018

In opting to avoid publicizing its top-line admissions numbers, Stanford said it hoped to do its part to discourage an obsession over the competition for the lowest admit rate.

Every year around the same time, colleges and universities release glowing news releases touting the record number of applications they received, sometimes followed closely by the minuscule percentage of applicants they accepted. In the past year alone, colleges heralded “a record-setting year,” “an unprecedented surge in applications,” “a historic increase in applications,” and “the highest number of prospective Bulldogs in recorded history.”

Stanford University said on Thursday that it’d had enough. The institution will no longer publicize top-line application numbers, it announced in a news release, starting this fall. In doing so, the institution said, it hoped to do its part to discourage an obsession over the competition for the lowest admit rate.

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“When Stanford publicizes its admission numbers during the enrollment cycle, the main result we observe is stories that aim to identify which universities experience the most demand and have the lowest admit rates,” wrote the university’s provost, Persis Drell. “That is not a race we are interested in being a part of, and it is not something that empowers students in finding a college that is the best match for their interests, which is what the focus of the entire process should be.”

Of course, in as much as all the boasting is done for exposure, Stanford can afford to sit out the ritual. It’s one of the richest and best-known universities in the world, sporting a $25-billion endowment and an admit rate of 5 percent. Nearly 50,000 people applied for admission to the Class of 2022.

“Each year, we strive to put together a class that is academically excellent, intellectually nimble, and enormously broad in backgrounds and perspectives,” Drell said in the release. “By focusing on the admit rate, talented students who would thrive at Stanford may opt not to apply because they think Stanford seems out of reach. And that would be a shame.”

Andy Thomason is a senior editor at The Chronicle. Send him a tip at andy.thomason@chronicle.com. And follow him on Twitter @arthomason.