News-Letter

Media Credit: Sarah Sabshon Admissions Folders [Click to enlarge]

The Office of Admissions reports approximately 14,700 regular decision applications for the class of 2011 -- nearly five percent greater than the class of 2010.

With applications up 65 percent in the last five years, Hopkins' applicant pool is increasing twice as fast in comparison to the average growth rate of the Ivy League and other top universities such as Georgetown and Duke. Minority students' applications have been growing twice as fast as the growth of the overall applicant pool, similar to the growth in international applications. In order to avoid over-enrollment, the admissions rate is expected to fall.

"We're taking an institution that has been acknowledged for academic and research strengths and adding to that a sense of quality of student life," Director of Undergraduate Admissions John Latting reasoned.

With 30 people employed for recruitment, the Admissions office has taken several initiatives to focus more on the students at Hopkins rather than the mere facts and figures.

Seeking to humanize the reputation and round out some of Hopkins' hard edges, a new interactive admissions Web site which features blogs of students of various backgrounds and live chats have been established, among other things.

"If our students are saying it's great here and getting better, and I think most student s are saying that, then that gets out and increases interest in coming here," Latting said.

For the first time, the Admissions staff began reading applications in December before the Jan. 1 deadline. Their goal was to increase its efficiency at identifying the top two-thirds of candidates in order to focus more attention on the applications that required more

attention.

"Our national reputation has also become more all-encompassing -- I hear just as much about our excellent International Studies and bioengineering programs as I do our consistently strong opportunities in the natural sciences," Amy Brokl, associate director of Admissions, said .

Indeed, the School of Engineering has been growing the fastest of all the undergraduate programs, and engineering students currently make up about one third of the freshman class. About 27 percent of the applications that have been read so far are from prospective engineering students.

The boost in numbers of applying students might also be explained by the annual one-percent increase in the number of total high-school graduates nationwide.

"In a perfect world we would come up slightly under the target in May and work our way back with a very small number of admissions off the wait list," Latting explained. This would give the school more control over the number of incoming students. Though exceeding such targets can often lead to overcrowding, it is yet another indication of the "upward trend in the appeal of Johns Hopkins," according to Latting.

For the first time in admissions history, New Jersey, New York and Maryland were surpassed by California as the state that generated the most applications. "[It's] impressive," Brokl, who is the admissions reader for the state, noted.

Freshman Kate Flores, a member of the Student Admissions Advisory Board commented, "I'm pleasantly awed by the applications I do read. I'm pretty sure the ones that I file but don't read are just as impressive. I don't know how the admissions counselors decide which students to admit and which ones to deny," Flores said. "Many of them have done things I've only dreamed of doing," she added.

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