Admission Rate Drops 18 Percent
BY SARAH MILLER-DAVENPORT

The College received 5,859 applicants this year — its largest applicant pool ever — and accepted 1,800. This allowed the College to be much more selective than in the past: the acceptance yield was 30 percent, down from 48 percent last year. Director of Admissions Paul Marthers said there are three reasons for the increase in applicants: there are more Americans graduating from high school than ever before, the economy is still good and Oberlin itself is becoming more popular.
Next year’s incoming first-year class is still in the making. Both the College and Conservatory admissions offices are currently in the process of collecting deposits from students planning to enroll, and do not yet have the final statistics on how the incoming class will look.
Over the past year, the College Admissions office has been much more aggressive in recruiting prospective students from different parts of the country. In addition to the usual areas Oberlin representatives visit — New York, the Bay Area, Boston, Washington D.C. — this year the Admissions office expanded its recruitment program to include more of the Midwest, the South and the Southwest.
The Admissions Office also changed its minority recruitment program and held two separate weekend fly-ins: one for Asian American applicants, and one for African American and Latino prospective students.
Although the College has started focusing more on athletic recruitment, with tennis coach Adam Shoemaker appointed as Assistant Director of Admissions this year, the Admissions office maintains that the percentage of athletes in next year’s first-year class, 10-15 percent, is no larger than past years and is still significantly smaller than many other liberal arts schools and Ivy League universities. 
In response to the charges by many current students that the College is trying to create a more conventional student body, Marthers said that Oberlin is not changing as much as many students like to claim it is. “The idea that Oberlin is losing its edge has been around as long as I can remember. They said that when I was a student in the 1980s. It could be that the group of students looking at Oberlin is becoming more mainstream.”
Marthers did confirm that the College is attempting to recruit fewer arts-oriented students so as not to overload departments like English and Creative Writing. “Unfortunately, there is this view that Oberlin is only for artsy students.”
The Conservatory, with fewer spaces to fill, is more certain of next year’s first-year class. The Conservatory had a target goal of enrolling 143 students, and as of yesterday it had met its goal exactly. “A primary consideration is filling spots in private teaching studios and filling ensemble and programmatic objectives. This year we were able to meet the needs of the programs and departments very nicely,” Director of Conservatory Admissions Michael Mandaren said.
There will also be more double-degree students (totaling 50 so far, up from 30 last year) than ever in next year’s incoming class. Mandaren attributes this increase to the aggressive recruiting done by the Conservatory faculty as well as a new program in which prospective students come in for a weekend in the fall and can apply early to both the College and the Conservatory.

Neither the College nor the Conservatory will know the final statistics on next year’s first-year class until the summer, after accepted students hear from schools at which they were wait-listed.