Monday, April 14, 2008

'US News and World Report' never checked this statistic.

According to recent stats, Cornell has the highest acceptance rates in the Ivy League. (Click here to read the story.) For the incoming freshmen, the Class of 2012 (yup, you're old), Cornell granted admission to 20.4 percent of applicants.

Yes, Cornell may be the easiest Ivy to get into, but it may just be the hardest to sing at!

At last count, the university was closing in on 20 undergraduate a cappella groups. If each group has 15 members, that's 300 undergrad a cappella singers.

In all, there are 12,000 undergrads at Cornell. Translation: 2.5% of the student body sings in an a cappella group.

Now, let's take Yale. The venerable institution accepts just 10% of its applicant pool.

But, Yale has 5,000 undergraduate students. And something like 17 a cappella groups. Translation: 5.1% of the student body sings in an a cappella group.

Of course this doesn't take into account the quality of these groups, or how competitive the auditions are (which depends on variables like the number of students turning up). But as a Cornell alum, I will sleep better tonight.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Only fourteen groups, at present, at least that I know of, making the privilege even rarer. In my day, Cornell just had five groups. It's kind of neat to hear of so many groups, especially since a lot of the newer ones are actually quite good.