After the most competitive admissions season in its history, Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences opens the 2011–12 academic year with 719 new students — 637 PhD candidates and 82 AM candidates.
GSAS received nearly 12,000 applications for admission in 2011–12 — a record high. Offers of admission were made to roughly 9 percent of that pool, or 1,188 applicants, up from 1,127 in the previous year.
High Yields
GSAS continues to enjoy impressively high yields among its admitted students, signaling a strong recruitment effort on the part of faculty eager to lure the most talented graduate students to Harvard. Offers of admission were accepted by more than 70 percent of admitted candidates in the social sciences and the humanities, and by more than 60 percent of admitted candidates in the sciences. The PhD programs in Anthropology, Architecture, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Inner Asian and Altaic Studies, Music, Organizational Behavior, and South Asian Studies enjoyed yields of 100 percent. Other examples of high-yielding programs are Organismic and Evolutionary Biology (90 percent), Psychology (82 percent), History of American Civilization (80 percent), and Government (79 percent).
“Beyond the numbers, the accomplishments of our incoming students are remarkable,” says GSAS Dean Allan Brandt, the Amalie Moses Kass Professor of the History of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a professor of the history of science in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “Many have already logged significant academic achievements, including major publications and real-world experience, making their admissions files look in many cases like the dossiers of newly appointed assistant professors.”
Recruiting Underrepresented Minorities
This admissions season was also notable for the major steps taken to begin to increase the number of underrepresented American minorities seeking the PhD at Harvard.
Despite past efforts, that number has remained at approximately 5 percent of the student population for roughly the last decade. Last fall, GSAS appointed Sheila Thomas as Assistant Dean for Diversity and Minority Affairs, and with the new appointment, worked proactively with key departments to raise their awareness of strategies to identify and recruit talented minorities, as well as to help them rethink approaches in which qualified candidates might be overlooked.
During the 2011–2012 admission cycle, Deans Brandt and Thomas asked admissions committees in the departments to select and discuss the best minority candidates in their applicant pool. This proved to be a useful exercise for identifying critical aspects of the admissions process that bear especially on the applications of applicants who often come from less well-known institutions.
These interventions had a positive impact. In the 2011–12 admissions cycle, GSAS admitted the largest number of minority students in recent memory. More important, it successfully recruited the largest number of minority students in the history of GSAS: 48 students (nearly 70% of those admitted) chose to matriculate (compared with 29 students, or less than 50% of those admitted, last year), thanks in large part to diligent work by faculty to build relationships with admitted students. As a result, nearly 6.5% of the incoming 2011–12 class is from underrepresented minority groups.