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Georgetown University accepted early action applicants for the undergraduate Class of 2025 at a record low admission rate, with a nearly 20% increase in applications from last year. 

The university admitted 940 students from a pool of 8,710 applicants at a 10.79% acceptance rate. The number of applications saw a 19% increase from last year, according to Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Charles Deacon (CAS ’64, GRD ’69). Early action applicants were notified of their decisions Dec. 13 when letters were posted to students’ online admission portals. 

Georgetown College had the lowest acceptance rate, admitting 504 out of 4,958 applicants for an acceptance rate of 10.17%. The School of Foreign Service had 1,629 applicants and admitted 206 for an acceptance rate of 12.65%. The McDonough School of Business admitted 163 out of 1,478 applicants for an acceptance rate of 11.03%. The School of Nursing and Health Studies received 645 applications and admitted 68 for an acceptance rate of 10.54%. Each school saw an increase in applications from the previous year.

This year’s increase in applications may be a result of new online college admissions resources and Georgetown’s global name recognition, according to Deacon.

“No matter where in the U.S. you are or around the world, you know about Georgetown,” Deacon said in an interview with The Hoya. “I think that there was a large pool of people who may not have had that normal access, you know, who went online and virtually to schools they knew about.”

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The acceptance rate for early action applications decreased to a record low for the third straight year, according to Deacon. Deacon said the early action acceptance rate is normally lower than regular decision to ensure that early action applicants have no advantage over regular decision applicants. 

“The early pool tends to be more of the ‘haves’ as opposed to the ‘have-nots.’ First-gen and low-income kids tend to apply later and so we don’t want to give away a disproportionate number of spaces early,” Deacon said.

The enrollment cap for the Class of 2025 is 1,600 students. In addition to considering demographic differences between application pools, the Office of Undergraduate Admissions must take into account spots reserved for students who chose to defer matriculation. Approximately 115 students who were admitted as part of the Class of 2024 decided to defer enrollment until fall 2021, according to Deacon. 

For the first time, the admissions office offered a flexible standardized testing requirement in which students were asked to submit ACT or SAT scores but were still considered for admission if they were unable to submit scores because of complications related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Of the early action pool, only 7.34% of applicants who did not submit standardized test scores were admitted.

Most applicants placed in the approximate top 5% of their class, with the mid-50% of ACT scores ranging from 33 to 35, mid-50% SAT verbal scores of 720 to 770, and mid-50% of SAT math scores from 730 to 790. Score ranges were consistent with those of prior years’ application cycles. 

As of Dec. 16, Georgetown had already received approximately 20,000 applications for the Class of 2025, putting the university on track to receive a record-breaking number of total undergraduate applications, according to Deacon. The admissions office received 21,318 applications for the Class of 2024.

Deacon said the increased volume of applications for the Class of 2025 may require his office to admit fewer transfer students as opposed to reducing the number of spots available for incoming first-year students.

“If the numbers are an issue, probably the transfer numbers are more likely to be impacted than the freshman number,” Deacon said. “We really feel it’s important to keep a steady first-year class coming in.”

The admissions office made several changes to its operating procedures to help accommodate student needs during the pandemic, according to Deacon. Georgetown offered daily virtual information sessions to applicants and made virtual recruiting visits to high schools, while Georgetown graduate interviews were also conducted via video call. 

Deacon said the virtual environment allowed Georgetown to conduct outreach to students of color, first-generation and low-income students despite the increased difficulty of applying to college during a pandemic. The admissions office created several new internet resources, including a website and student panels, to provide a glimpse into the student experience. 

“A lot of those things we actually did because we could do them virtually and we’d never tried to do that in person because you would have to bring people to campus,” Deacon said. 

The number of admitted students who are Black, Hispanic/Latinx and Asian American and Pacific Islander all increased from last year’s early action cycle, according to Deacon. 

“One thing that we’ve been most happy about is, to a fairly significant degree, the number of applicants, even in all of the issues we’re facing, did hold up among students of color and first-gen, and actually increases even there as well,” Deacon said. 

However, according to Deacon, the number of first-generation and low-income students who filled out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid this year has decreased from past admission cycles.

Some of this year’s virtual programming will continue in application cycles after the pandemic, according to Deacon. 

“We will merge virtuals and kind of meetings into our regular activities starting next fall,” Deacon said. “So we’ll continue the interpersonal work but enhance it by putting these virtual things in its place.”

This article was updated Dec. 31 to clarify the description of admission statistics.

BOSTON — A former Georgetown University tennis coach accused of accepting more than $2 million in bribes to help kids get into the school will plead guilty in the sweeping college admissions scandal, according to court documents filed Wednesday.

Gordon Ernst’s decision to plead guilty comes as the first trial in the massive case that ensnared wealthy parents and athletic coaches across the country is being held in Boston’s federal court.

Ernst, who was scheduled to go on trial in November, agreed to admit to charges including conspiracy to commit federal programs bribery, according to the court records. His attorney declined to comment on Wednesday.

Prosecutors agreed to recommend a sentence of no more than four years in prison, according to the plea agreement. Ernst has promised to ask for no less than a year behind bars.

Ernst, who was the head men and women’s tennis coach at Georgetown, was arrested in March 2019 along with more than four dozen others in the so-called “Operation Varsity Blues” case that revealed a scheme to get undeserving kids into elite universities with rigged test scores or bogus athletic credentials.

Ernst was charged with getting bribes from the admissions consultant at the center of the scheme, Rick Singer, in exchange for designating multiple applicants as Georgetown tennis recruits.

Ernst, who also was the personal tennis coach for former first lady Michelle Obama and her daughters, left Georgetown in 2018 after an internal investigation launched over what the school described as “irregularities in the athletic credentials” of students he was recruiting concluded that he violated admissions rules.

He was later hired by the University of Rhode Island, which claimed it wasn’t told about the admissions rules violations. He resigned from that school shortly after his arrest.

Ernst had been fighting the charges for more than two years and was set to stand trial alongside the former senior associate athletic director at the University of Southern California, Donna Heinel, and two other coaches: ex-USC water polo coach Jovan Vavic and former Wake Forest University women’s volleyball coach William Ferguson.

A total of 57 people have been charged in the case and nearly four dozen have already pleaded guilty.

The longest sentence handed out so far has been nine months given to the former CEO of the Pacific Investment Management Co., Douglas Hodge, who paid bribes totaling $850,000 to get four of his children into USC and Georgetown as athletic recruits.

Two parents — former casino executive Gamal Abdelaziz and former Staples and Gap Inc. executive John Wilson — are on trial on charges that they paid hundreds of thousands dollars to help get their kids into USC by falsely presenting them as athletic recruits. Wilson is also accused of shelling out more than $1 million to buy his twin daughters’ ways into Harvard and Stanford.

The trial is expected to last several weeks. Defense lawyers told jurors during their opening statements on Monday that the parents were duped by Singer and led to believe that their payments were legitimate donations.

Singer, who began cooperating with investigators in 2018 and secretly recorded his phone calls with the parents, was expected to be a key witness for the government. But prosecutors told jurors on Monday they will not call him to the stand.

There are many factors to weigh in deciding where to apply to medical school. For starters:

• Your competitiveness as reflected in your GPA and MCAT score (see Accepted’s Selectivity Index for more on that data)
• The quality of your clinical exposure and community service
• The personal qualities and character revealed through your commitments as reflected both in your essays, activity history, and recommendations
• Your fit with specific schools

One element of that fit is how schools look at in-state (IS) and out-of-state (OOS) applicants. Accepted has compiled the data on acceptance rates for U.S. medical school included in the U.S. News 2021 rankings. In this table, you can see the different acceptance rates for in-state and out-of-state, the ratio of in-state to out-of-state acceptance rates and whether those ratios are none, negligible, modest, material, or huge. You can also sort the data by any of these elements.

<< READ: Tuition-Free Medical School: Everything You Need to Know in 2020-21 >>

How to Use the In-State vs. Out-of-State Tool

Which of your state’s medical schools prefer in-state applicants?

On a basic level, check to see if your local medical schools prefer in-state residents. Most medical schools associated with public universities and some private med schools that receive funding from states have strong preferences for in-state residents as evidenced by in-state acceptance rates that are at least double the out-of-state acceptance rates. Schools where the in-state acceptance rate is four times (or more) higher than the out-of-state rate have a “Huge” difference. Chances of out-of-state applicants being accepted are very low when the gap is that big.

Obviously if you live in a state where the medical school has a strong preference for in-state residents as evidenced by its in-state acceptance rate being double, triple, quadruple, or more than the out-of-state acceptance rate, and if your stats are even close to your local medical school’s class profile, you want to apply to your in-state school. In addition to a higher statistical chance of acceptance, if accepted you may pay lower tuition as an in-state resident. You may also benefit from being closer to home and your support network.  

Out-of-State Programs Open to Out-Of-State Applicants.

Conversely, if you live in a state with only one or perhaps no medical schools or in a state that has many more med school applicants than its med schools can accept (like California), you will need to consider out-of-state programs. In addition to applying to your local in-state schools, you must apply out of state to maximize the chances that you are accepted somewhere to study medicine. To enhance your chances of acceptance, you want to select primarily those out-of-state schools where there is no or negligible difference in acceptance rates between in-state and out-of-state applicants and where you are competitive.

On our chart, you can either sort the index by the Out-of-State Acceptance Rate, the Ratio of In-State to Out-of-State Acceptance Rates, or the In-State Advantage. If you choose the latter, also select the down arrow so that those with the least difference will be at the top. 

You will quickly realize that those schools with the least preference for in-state students tend to be among the most selective overall. But not all have average MCATs of 520+ and average GPAs of 3.9. Use Accepted’s Med School Selectivity Index and AAMC’s MSAR to determine the schools where you are likely to be competitive.

Easiest Med Schools to Get Into for Out-of-State Applicants

Here are the five U.S. medical schools with the highest acceptance rate for out-of-state applicants in the U.S. News medical school 2021 rankings

Applying to programs more likely to accept you contributes enormously to a successful medical school application.

Two wealthy former executives who bribed their kids’ way into some of the nation’s most elite universities were convicted in federal court in Boston on Friday in what one former MIT admissions officer called a loss for everyone affected by “Operation Varsity Blues.”

“I think everyone loses in this circumstance — the students those slots could have gone to, but I’m also sad for the children of these parents because they’re receiving the message that…you can cheat your way into anything and hard work is not enough.”

The jury deliberated for about 10 hours before convicting Gamal Abdelaziz, a former Wynn Resorts executive, and John Wilson, a Lynnfield resident and former Staples Inc. executive, in a case that exposed a scheme to get unqualified students into college by falsely portraying them as star athletes.

“What they did was an affront to hardworking students and parents, but the verdict today proves that even these defendants — powerful and privileged people — are not above the law,” Acting Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Nathaniel Mendell told reporters.

The two are to be sentenced in February.

“This is obviously not the result Mr. Abdelaziz was hoping for,” attorney Brian Kelly said in an email, vowing to appeal.

An email seeking comment from Wilson’s attorney was not immediately answered.

Over the course of the four-week trial, Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Frank argued that Wilson, 62, paid college admissions consultant William “Rick” Singer $220,000 in 2014 to get his son into the University of Southern California as a purported water polo recruit, and $1 million in 2018 to get his twin daughters into Harvard and Stanford universities for sports they didn’t play.

Singer, the so-called “Godfather” behind the scheme, now is cooperating with the government and admitted to siphoning off money he was paid to people who could help increase students’ ACT exam scores and get them into college as athletic recruits, even though they didn’t play the sports their applications said they did.

“It was a sweeping conspiracy that involved dozens of parents who would stop at nothing to get their children” into elite universities, Frank said in closing arguments.

Some of the money parents paid was diverted to a “charity” of Singer’s or to the schools their kids were applying to, he said.

Frank called it “a bribe, a quid pro quo….No matter where the money goes, it was fraud. Without the money, the kids would never have gotten in.”

Brian Kelly, one of Abdelaziz’s lawyers, argued, “A quid pro quo is not illegal unless there is corrupt intent. There’s no proof Gamal Abdelaziz had corrupt intent.”

Likewise, Wilson’s attorney, Michael Kendall, said, “There is no proof that John said anything wrong to anyone. Parents were not making bribes; they thought they were making donations.”

Last month, Gordon Ernst, the onetime head tennis coach at Georgetown University, became the latest Varsity Blues defendant to admit the match was over.

The 54-year-old from Chevy Chase, Md. and Falmouth will plead guilty to bribery and filing a false tax return, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston.

He has also agreed to forfeit nearly $3.44 million he earned from the college admissions scheme.

He faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine on the most serious bribery charge.