The Office of Admission received 2,449 applications for early decision this year, almost a 6 percent increase from last year, according to Dean of Admission Jim Miller '73. The University also received 75 applications for the recently announced Brown-RISD dual degree program, which is accepting its first class of students for the 2008-09 academic year.
Last year the University received 2,316 early decision applications - a 2.5 percent decrease from 2005.
"We didn't have a whole lot of time to get it out and describe it," Miller said of the dual degree program, so he's "gratified" by the number of applications received.
The increase in early decision applications to Brown may be in part because of the elimination of early acceptance programs at Harvard and Princeton universities in the fall of 2006, Miller said. "Some of the early action schools," like Yale and Georgetown universities, "have significant increases partially due to the end of the Harvard and Princeton programs," he said.
Still, "it's hard to tell how much of that is the product of the Princeton and Harvard (decision)," he added.
Miller explained that he is not sure what the ultimate early acceptance rate will be. "We'll just have to see how the reading goes."
For the class of 2011, the early decision acceptance rate was 22.7 percent, though the rejection rate was only 12.7 percent. The remaining applications were deferred into the regular admission pool. That marked the second year in a row that Brown was the most selective school in the Ivy League for early decision.
Yale, which has a non-binding, single-choice early action program, saw a 13 percent decrease in early applications last year and accepted 19.7 percent of early applicants.
Last year, 26.2 percent of students who applied early decision to Princeton were accepted, a two percent increase from 2005.
Data on the number of early applications received by other Ivy League schools were not yet available.
"The hardest part of the admissions process ... is balancing your time," wrote Doug Bensimon, a senior at Weston High School in Weston, Mass., in an e-mail to The Herald. He applied early to Brown because he thinks the school fits well with his learning style as "someone who really likes to experience new things on a daily basis," he wrote.
"In the end, applying early seemed like the most reasonable choice; I wanted to go to Brown and had no doubts about it," wrote Jason De Stefano, a high school senior from New Jersey, in an e-mail to The Herald.
De Stefano thinks the hardest part of the application process is what he's doing now - waiting. "I have an online countdown in my AIM profile that I check along with the Brown Web site every day," he wrote.
