Early Decision Applications down 23%

The number of high school students applying regular decision to WPI for the class of 2005 remained steady while the number of students applying early decision has fallen over 23 percent from last year. WPI's Director of Undergraduate Admissions, Kristin Tichenor responded to the application numbers and provided some insight as to why applications might be down.

According to Tichenor, WPI receives over 3,000 applications each year. The past two years have shown a higher number of applications, and expectations for this year were to reach the same mark. For the numbers on total applications, there were 3,220 last year, compared to 3,151 this year. That is a 2% drop in total applications.

Breaking these applications down into regular decision and early decision .

The number of regular decision applications has dropped by 11 since last year, from 2,964 to 2,953, which is not a significant drop. With early decision applications, however, the drop is more significant. The number of early decision applications has fallen from 256 to 198. This is roughly a 23% decrease. "We did see a decline this year in early decision applications, and that has been a trend for WPI over the last 5 years," says Tichenor. "That's actually a trend for a lot of colleges and universities that offer a binding early decision plan, and it's our best guess that we're seeing students that are comparing a binding agreement with many non-binding agreements that are available to them". When asked if WPI would be implementing a non-binding early decision option in the near future to counter this, she stated, "We are absolutely talking about offering a non-binding early application plan, most often called 'early action'."

As for minority and women applicants, according to the last count on February 13, minority applications are well up from two years ago and only 3 applications down from last year. In terms of women, there are only about 100 fewer women applications from last year, and about 80 fewer applications from two years ago. This drop in women applications has puzzled the Admissions Office because the recruitment incentives have been the same as they were last year, and in fact they have added another overnight program for later this academic year. In the past many women choose to enroll through early decision. So, just the fact that the Early Decision applications are down can give some insight to this.

The drop in women applicants while having kept the same recruitment plan did get the Admissions Office thinking. "When we were taking a look at the fact that we had fewer women in the pool, we immediately wondered if there were some changes in terms of the geographic backgrounds of the students, the academic quality of the students and so forth. After doing an analysis of at least the female portion of the pool, we were surprised by how consistent these students are. Almost identical quality, almost identical percentage of students who have legacy connections to the institution, almost identical percentage of students who are from outside of new England, and their financial aid needs are very comparable. So they're almost the same people it's just that there are fewer of them," stated Tichenor.

One thing to consider is that two new engineering programs for women have started in Massachusetts in just the past year. There is a program at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering and their goal of making engineering "user friendly" for women and the new engineering program at Smith.