Fitzsimmons said that the applicants for the Class of 2009 were as competitive as in years past, adding that many highly qualified candidates had to be turned down.
“It’s always hard to get in...but it seemed unusually tough this year,” Fitzsimmons said. “We finally ended up having to take out a lot of people who were very good.”
Harvard’s 9.1 percent acceptance rate—a drop from last year’s rate of 10.3 percent—made Harvard more competitive than all of its rival schools this year.
Princeton admitted 10.9 percent of its applicants this year, while Stanford admitted just under 12 percent.
Yale admitted 9.7 percent of its applicants. Last year, Yale accepted 9.9 percent of applicants, proving more selective than Harvard.
Harvard notified most applicants of its admission decisions on Thursday evening via e-mail. All students were sent traditional notification letters as well.
Harvard plans to hold a Visiting Program for admitted students the weekend of April 29-30, during which prospective students will have the chance to gain an extended look at the college. The admissions office said in the statement that it will also reach out to accepted applicants in the next month through online chat rooms and message boards, regional gatherings of prospective classmates, and personal meetings with admissions officers.
Admitted students have until May 3 to accept or decline a place in Harvard’s Class of 2009.
Fitzsimmons noted that a small number of students are typically granted admission after that date.
“What we try to do is to take about 50 or 75 off the wait list,” he said. “Some years, it’s over the 100; some years, it’s none.”
Fitzsimmons added that he does not expect that the controversy over Summers’ January remarks on women in science or last month’s lack-of-confidence vote from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences will significantly affect Harvard’s yield—the percentage of admitted students who opt to attend.
“We have no evidence that all the publicity since January will affect things either way,” he said. “[Choosing a college] is oftentimes a long-term process. It’s not something that can be tipped either way by recent events.”
In recent years, Harvard’s yield has stood close to 80 percent, usually leading to a freshman class of about 1650 students.
—Staff writer Daniel J. T. Schuker can be reached at dschuker@fas.harvard.edu.