This year, 685 fine young men and 679 charming young ladies applying to Cornell neglected to indicate what college they wanted to apply to and therefore were automatically rejected.

Now, this is pretty stupid.  Of course, despite the implication by fellow bloggers that this inflates the acceptance rate, it doesn't, as anyone with a simple understanding of math would know.  Cornell has a set number of slots.  Therefore, acceptance rate is determine SOLELY by the number of applicants.  Those people did in fact apply to Cornell- they just did it poorly- so it is valid to consider them applicants.  There are a lot of ways to **** up an application.  They just win the prize for most moronic. 

The data about the class of 2011 is chock full o' other goodies, such as these:

• Cornell accepted one person with a verbal SAT score from 200-399. This person declined to enroll.
• The engineering college accepted 44% of female applicants and 27% of male applicants.  More than three times as many men applied than women.  (What?  You don't think that the females were admitted soley on their qualifications as students?)
• Human Ecology admitted 33% of male applicants and 36% of female applicants.  A little less than three times as many women applied than men.  (Apparently affirmative action only applies to women in engineering.  Poor guys in human ecology... despite being underrepresented, actually FEWER of them were admitted!)
• There's no data on SAT writing scores.  They must be really important, huh!  Good job, ETS!

This post partially brought to you by IvyGateBlog and MetaEzra.  VerboseVixen, giving you original reporting since 2007.