Inertia on financial aid narrows Yale's applicants:

Yale is the only Ivy League school to report a decrease in the total number of applications it received this year, with all but one of the eight universities having released their statistics. Applications to Yale decreased by 1.2 percent from 19,675 applications last year to 19,430 applications this year. Princeton received an unprecedented total of 16,077 applications, a 17 percent increase from last year, and Harvard received a record high of 22,717 applications, a 15 percent increase from the total number of applications received for the class of 2008. With a 10 percent increase in applications, Brown also received its highest number of applications yet, with over 16,800 applications. Other Ivy League schools enjoyed significant increases Cornell University, Dartmouth College and Columbia University saw their applications increase by 14 percent, 7 percent and 5.5 percent, respectively. Cornell received over 24,000 applications, Dartmouth received 12,625 applications, and Columbia received 18,236 applications... Yale Dean of Admissions Richard Shaw said he was not concerned about the small drop in Yale applicants, and that he thought the University -- which received a record number of applications last year -- was still "way up there" in terms of the aggregate number of applicants. "We have to put this all into context," Shaw said. "Numbers don't make the institution. There's a huge mistake in assuming that because A went up 5 percent, B went up 10 percent and C went down that C is falling from grace. That's just not true. These trends go up and down. If it was a precipitated drop I'd worry, but we had a record high last year." But Josh Eidelson '06, a member of the Undergraduate Organizing Committee, said he thought that the decline in applications to Yale would continue until the University moves towards financial aid reforms in line with reforms Harvard and Princeton have recently instituted...In a Jan. 17 interview with the News, Yale University President Richard Levin said the University was trying to assess whether it should move in the direction of the financial aid reforms implemented by Harvard last year. Levin also said he thought Yale was successful this year in recruiting low-income students.