Welcoming the Class of 2011

With college applications on the rise nationwide, spring proved both exciting and exhausting for admission officers, including those at CMC, who culled through the largest applicant pool in the College's history.

With applications up by 15 percent from the previous year, Claremont McKenna College's admission team received a total of 4,140 applications for its entering class this year. Of the thousands who applied, 670 were offered enrollment, a 16 percent rate of admission, which was, by far, "the lowest admission rate ever in our history," said Vice President and Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Richard Vos. (Rates in more recent years have hovered around 21 percent.)

This year's admission rate ties CMC with Pomona College's 16 percent rate of admission and distinguishes the two colleges as having the lowest admittance rate in the country among national liberal arts colleges. "By traditional measures, we were one of the two most selective small liberal arts colleges in America this past year," Vos said.

Because CMC has recently been over-enrolled (last fall's freshman class numbered 294 instead of a projected 265), the admission staff was especially mindful this spring of the entering class numbers, which then made the application reading process unusually tough.

"Throughout the file-reading season we thought we were under-admitting and we were incredibly tight on who was voted admission," Vos said. "And we assumed that we would remove some students from our waiting list in May."

However, there still were more records to be broken: Of the 670 students admitted to CMC, 270 elected to enroll—a yield of 40 percent, and the highest the College has had since the 1970s. This bumper crop meant that no students were removed from the waiting list.

"This class has lots of geographic and ethnic diversity," Vos says, "lots of leadership and talent. And lots of academic strength."

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