Figure 1: Total students applied to Carleton College versus total students admitted to Carleton College from the 1999-2000 admission cycle to the 2023-2024 admission cycle.
2013-14 (Class of 2017):
The first trend that we explored was the spike in total number of applicants and decrease in acceptance rate for the 2013-14 application cycle.
- The applicant pool was 20% larger than the previous year’s pool, which led to an almost 5% decrease in acceptance rate seen in the bar chart above.
- As of 2024, Carleton has been ranked #1 for Best Undergraduate Teaching by the U.S. News & World Report for the 13th year in a row. This means that the first year that Carleton was ranked #1 was 2012. There is a correlation between this ranking and the subsequent increase in total applicants post-2011 and the spikes in 2012-13 and 2013-14.
- Carleton’s membership of QuestBridge brought in applicants that would otherwise not have applied. QuestBridge helps low-income students apply to highly-selective colleges (Stein, Applications Fall 11% – The Carletonian).
- Carleton increased their web presence by spending more resources advertising Carleton and what it has to offer (Stein, Applications Fall 11% – The Carletonian).