Another year has flown by and Conn is preparing to welcome the incoming Class of 2022. This year, the College received its highest number of applicants in the school’s history: over 6,400. Conn received around 5,400 for the Class of 2021.
The information on the school’s website regarding this year’s application process points to the Connections curriculum as a large factor in the surge of submitted applications. However, it is also important to note that the school dropped their application fee this year. In addition, Conn does not require students to complete any supplemental essays.
One admitted student visiting for Camel Day said she was interested in Conn during her application process, and particularly incentivized to apply because the application was free. In 2017, Colby College also removed its admission fee and received 11,190 applications, a remarkable increase from its previous numbers. The correlation between cost of applying and applications received is quite visible, but Conn will likely not advertise this a main contributing factor to their applicant pool increase.
The 2017-2018 statistics on other NESCAC schools indicate that increasing applicant pools is not exclusive to Connecticut College in this most recent college application process. 9,722 applications were sent to Amherst. The college also claims this is the largest and most diverse pool of applicants it has ever seen. Bates drew in a record number of applications, with 7,688. Bowdoin saw 9,081 applicants, and issued its lowest ever acceptance rate at 10.3%. 12,313 students applied to Colby. Hamilton faced its largest applicant pool of 6,238 applications, marking the first time since the school was chartered in 1812 that over 6,000 people applied. Middlebury brought it a record-high number of applications with 9,230. Tufts reviewed 21,502 applications, the school’s largest number thus far, and accepted 14.6%. 12,788 applications were seen by Wesleyan, which accepted 17.% of students. Williams received 9,559 applications. Numbers for Trinity’s total applicant pool could not be found. Five out of 9 NESCAC schools with available data saw record numbers of interested applicants.
It is interesting to compare this data to the application fees at the various NESCAC institutions. Hamilton requires applicants pay $50 to apply. Williams’s price is set at $55. Bates’s fee is $60. Applications for Amherst, Bowdoin, Middlebury, Trinity, and Williams cost $65. Tufts is the most expensive NESCAC to apply to at $75. While there does not appear to be any direct and obvious correlation between application fees and schools which received record numbers of applicants this year, Colby and Conn’s experience with sharp hikes in applicants since dropping their fees is noteworthy, and perhaps foreshadows a growing trend among NESCACs in an attempt to bring in more applications.
Of course, the most important factor to focus on when considering what large applicant pools mean for schools is selectivity. Most of these schools receiving increasing numbers of interested students are not concurrently expanding the sizes of their student bodies by any significant margin. With more applications and relatively the same number of available spots, schools acceptance rates are getting lower. As a result, schools are beginning to look more and more selective.
While most of these schools continue to see growth in their application numbers, it will be interesting to see how long this trend can be sustained, and if these shrinking acceptance numbers will eventually reach a turning point where they begin to turn away the interests of students.
In the past few weeks, Camel Days were flooded (sometimes literally) with prospective students and families parading around campus on tours and at the academic fairs in the library. As always, Conn will likely see a diverse, talented, and excited incoming Class of 2022 commit by the beginning of next month.
