Bad News Bears...

Has the population of “green haired” high school students plateaued? Shirley Tilghman’s now-infamous desire to attract students with a penchant for hairdye may be backfiring!

Princeton has suffered a second major blow to its ego in less than six months! In August, the university dropped down an entire spot to number two in the annual US News & World Report rankings, and two weeks ago, Janet Rapelye’s admissions office announced that this year’s applicant pool for the class of 2013 grew just two percent.

This figure, so far, represents the smallest growth in applications among its peer schools (Columbia and Penn have yet to release their data). As the table above shows, Brown saw a whopping 21 percent increase in applicants this year, and even Cornell reported a higher increase with three percent.

After the jump, the second table shows that Princeton’s application numbers haven’t grown as quickly over the past three years, compared to Harvard’s and Yale’s:

Princeton’s two percent increase this year does, however, constitute the largest applicant pool in the school’s history, but it’s basically the same story at all of Princeton’s peer schools.

No word yet why Princeton’s application numbers seemed to have plateaued this year, so let the speculation begin. Aside from a national shortage of green hairdye, other reasons may include grade deflation, and, umm, grade deflation.