Despite admitting even fewer applicants than last year, Harvard was less selective than Yale in choosing the Class of 2008, marking the first time in recent memory that the Bulldogs have been top-dog in the Harvard-Yale admissions rivalry.

Yale accepted a record-low 9.9 percent of its largest-ever applicant pool, edging out Harvard’s acceptance rate of 10.3 percent.

The Bulldogs’ admissions coup is virtually unprecedented.

Harvard’s acceptance rate has been lower than Yale’s for at least the past eight years.

Dean of Admissions William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 said he did not have records on whether Yale has ever had a lower acceptance rate in pervious years.“We don’t really compare acceptance rates and things like that,” Fitzsimmons said.

Yale College has a smaller class than Harvard, which means that fewer applicants are usually accepted. This year, Yale accepted 1,950 applicants, compared to 2,015 last year.

Harvard accepted 2,029 applicants for the Class of 2008, down from 2,056.

“[Yale] has a class of around thirteen, fourteen hundred so they of course are going to go out with fewer admits,” Fitzsimmons said.

Yale also enjoyed a surge in applications this year, most likely a result of its shift to a single-choice early action program, Fitzsimmons said.

“The effect on the earlies, they actually went up a lot. We on the other hand went down considerably. There’s no question that clearly would factor into the number of applications they had.” he said.

Harvard switched to the same program this year, which limited its previous policy that had allowed applicants to apply to multiple institutions early.

“Some people have been rediscovering Yale just as the same way Columbia has been rediscovered in recent years,” Fitzsimmons said, citing campus improvements and recent redevelopment projects in New Haven as factors attracting students to Yale. “I think that Yale is getting its due.”

But Fitzsimmons also wonders whether the reason could be much simpler.

“Again, my brother would say, ‘It’s the mascot,’” he said. Fitzsimmons’s brother is a Yale alumnus.

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