As Da-Young Kim opened her status update in the University’s applicant portal April 6, she prepared for the hallmark of Ivy Day disappointment: a message on white letterhead that read “we regret to inform you.”

As the University finishes its first admission cycle with a test-optional policy, implemented due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a majority of student voters advocated for the University to make the policy permanent on a recent referendum on the Undergraduate Council of Students’ spring election ballot. 

The University extended offers of admission to 1,652 students tonight, bringing this year’s overall acceptance rate to a record-low of 5.4 percent, according to Dean of Admissions Logan Powell.

In this week’s episode of The Bruno Brief, we peel back the curtain on Brown admissions during the COVID-19 pandemic. We talk to Senior Staff Writer Will Kubzansky, who spoke with two University admissions committees about how life has changed during a year of unprecedented applicant numbers and a public health crisis. 

Admission officers make the case to high schoolers as to why they should apply to the University. The grueling work all serves a larger goal: attracting, admitting and yielding an incoming first-year class.

When Annie Smith Peck submitted her application to the University in 1874 — the first woman to do so — she received a curt response from President Ezekiel Robinson.  “Women are not encouraged to seek higher education,” he wrote, according to Peck’s biographer Hannah Kimberley.

The College Board announced Jan. 19 that it will discontinue SAT Subject Tests and the optional essay section on the SAT, marking a significant change to the status quo of standardized testing in college admissions. 

Applications to the University reached an all-time high for the class of 2025, exceeding last year’s total by nearly 10,000 students, Dean of Admission Logan Powell told The Herald.

The University accepted a record-low 15.9 percent of early applicants to the class of 2025, down from 17.5 percent last year, according to Dean of Admissions Logan Powell. The number of accepted students and the number of applicants — 885 and 5,540, respectively — are the largest in University history. 

He was raised by a single mother in a trailer park in Jacksonville, Florida, where very few people ever went to college at all, and he doesn’t think he would have known at the time what the “qualifications are that are necessary to get into a place as incredible as Brown,” he said.