Hours before Associate Dean of Admission Jeannine Lalonde (Dean J) posted her usual heads up to applicants that the University of Virginia was getting ready to post decisions, gizmo18 let the cat out of the bag on College Confidential: “Decisions come out today!”
Seven hours later, Dean J confirmed that applicants could expect to see one of three decisions—admitted, denied or waitlisted—sometime in the next few hours. And by 5:00, the wait was over.
“I can’t believe it! I got in,” crowed one happy applicant. “After straight rejections from Northwestern and GaTech I thought it was over. Words cannot describe my excitement.”
Another reported, “Didn’t expect much after rejections from Northwestern and Uchicago last week. But I’m happy I was proven wrong!!!! I was worried that writing my essay about Nike and Adidas in the sneaker industry was weird, but I guess not!!!!!!!!”
And from KingUU: “I got accepted! I’m so happy! Dreams can be real! UVA was my number 1 choice.”
But the news wasn’t universally happy.
“Deferred then waitlisted in state,” moaned another applicant. “Bruh just reject me already.”
Others were more philosophical, “Deferred EA, rejected RD. It was a long shot, but I definitely learned a lot about myself through it. Congrats to all who got in and good luck to everybody!”
To give the decisions context, Dean posted preliminary numbers for this year later in the week and recommended that admissions junkies with a real “need to know” could research numbers using a new tool devised by the UVa assessment team for presenting data in Tableau.
But the simple comparison with 2016 is interesting enough. Last year at this time, UVa reported receiving 32,426 applications (this number tends to jump around a little)—a significant increase from the previous year—and made initial offers to 9,416 students.
For this year’s class, the total number of applications soared to 36,807, with the number of in-state applicants increasing from 9,653 reported a year ago to 10,942 for the class of 2021.
The biggest contributing factor to the overall increase in applications, however, was the bump from out-of-state students who submitted 25,865 applications—up from 22,773 during 2015-2016.
To account for a steadily decreasing yield (percent of students accepting offers), which dropped from 53 percent in 2005-06 to 38 percent in 2016-17, as well as a need to continue growing class size, admissions increased offers to 9,957—about six percent more than last year. Of these offers, 4,276 went to Virginians (4,019 last year), and 5,681 went to out-of-state students (5,397 last year).
Early action admits accounted for 5914 of total. And the initial admission rate decreased to about 27 percent from 29 percent last year.
According to information provided by UVa to the Common Data Set, 4,987 students were offered spots on the wait list last year, and 2,871 accepted the offer. Of those students, 360 were eventually admitted.
In any event, here are all the “unofficial” numbers released by the UVa admissions office:
Total number of applications: 36,807 (up from 32,426 last year)
Total number of VA applications: 10,942 (up from 9,653 last year)
Total number of out-of-state applications: 25,865 (up from 22,773)
Overall offers: 9,957 (9,416 this time last year)
Total VA offers: 4,276 or 39% of resident applications (4,019/41.6% last year)
Total out-of-state offers: 5,681 or 22% of nonresident applications (5,397/23.7% last year)
Note that the offers of admission for nonresidents are higher because historic yield for nonresidents is generally lower than that for in-state student.
In a press release, UVa reports that of those admitted, over 1,000 are first-generation college students and more than 35 percent identify as members of a minority group. They come from all 50 states and 89 countries around the world.
And they present outstanding credentials. For those admitted who submitted new SAT scores, the middle 50 percent range was 1330-1490 (Dean J notes that “way more” students submitted the new SAT than the old, so she dropped the stats about the old exam). The middle 50 percent ACT composite was 31-34. And 93.4 percent of admitted students were in the top ten percent of their high school class, for those who attend schools that report rank.
