7.2% acceptance rate sounds very high compared to Stanford’s 4.3%. Crazy. In two years, it will be below 4% acceptance rate. I wonder why Stanford attracts so many applicants among top 10 schools when they know it’s the hardest to get in?
One of the best universities in the world, located in sunny California, deeply ensconced in the STEM mecca? I’m surprised Stanford doesn’t get more applicants.
Uchicago usually releases official numbers early fall.
@foosondaughter Thank you for posting these numbers. I know that this has been asked before, so I apologize, but the public really needs good information that splits out the RD rates. Yes, some school are very upfront about this number (Duke clearly states the ED / RD rates on its admissions page in giant font!). We discussed earlier how some schools don’t want these numbers widely disseminated - that but is exactly what is needed (do they fear some public shaming?)
It seems to me that the end game is a fundamental change - away from applying to multiple schools, to a system where each student picks one college (ED1) and if rejected, goes to choice 2 with ED2, and so forth. Or can we foresee a match process as is used for medical residency spots? This year I had my first child go through the process, so I am such a novice to the process, but from reading all these posts, it sounds like the trend in college admissions is unsustainable.
I think its because applicants now see their college list as impossible/reach/match/safety with Stanford/Harvard and other ~5% acceptance rate schools as impossible (Even with high stats but don’t stand out in their applicant pool) So they don’t apply thinking its wasted effort.
The decreasing acceptance rate also shows a clear pattern reflecting this
top ~8 schools shows decrease of about 1% YOY
~8-14 schools shows decrease of about 2% YOY
~15-30 shows decrease of about 3% YOY
Applicants are piling downwards as top 8 races towards 5% acceptance rate, 8-14 races towards 7% and so on.
As for why this is happening, my theory is because of explosion of professional college counseling services. More applicants apply to more schools, better prepared, improved credentials etc. Most top applicants have to up their game.
@websensation Stanford is top of the line for STEM, computers/ IT and start up opportunities. Uchicago has no engineering.
Many folks are also scared by the Chicago weather. For most, Stanford is understandably is the ultimate dream school.
This increasing number of applications and falling acceptance rates are really intriguing. It is hard to pinpoint but after doing the college admissions roller coaster with my kids the last three years, I imagine the trend is due to a combination of things:
- Common app has exploded number of applications
- High achieving needy students are catching on to the idea that the better the school the cheaper (free) it will be. This is because elite schools are need-blind and cover full need.
- International students are applying in bigger numbers and colleges love full pay students
- Colleges are actively marketing by mail and in person. Elite schools are now sending reps traveling all over the country in summer and fall. They visit towns, fill the hotel info sessions and really entice kids to apply. Nevermind that those schools haven’t accepted anyone from those towns in years.
- As rates go down, kids feel that they need to apply to more schools thereby having the effect of further increasing applications and lowering acceptance rates.
- “Holistic Admissions” is sometimes false hope that seems to imply that anyone has a shot. You never know unless you apply. Right?
I’d love to see the breakdown of EA/SCEA/ED/RD, as well. I know it’s a lot of work, though, to figure those numbers out…at least for me it is! Thank you in advance to whoever is talented and smart enough to extrapolate those numbers.
Excellent analysis. Let me add one point here. Top schools are getting beyond their traditional bases (suburban public schools and private schools, with educated and at least middle class parents). They are targeting students from rural high schools, inner cities, and so on … and they are actively seeking more minority students, more first generation students, and more students that qualify for pell grants. And students from these groups feel that they can get admitted and can afford to attend (no loan financial aid etc.)
From anecdotal evidence I have, it seems that students from the more traditional base of highly selective schools (education and middle-upper income parents) are now finding the admission process extremely competitive. You hear stories of top ranked students and perfect ACT getting rejected from all ivies etc. Unless they are legacy or extremely rich.
@osuprof Agreed. Moreover, the larger the endowment, the less weight is given to legacy. This is a new world of college admissions. If parents spend 45K a year for fancy private schools to enhance kids’ admissions chances, they may wish to rethink that. College admissions by itself is no longer a co pulling argument. Those days are gone.
@Chrchill Private schools for sure. And perhaps magnet schools as well. Go there for their merits, but not because of any amplification of selective college admissions chances.
I’d posit two additional factors-grade inflation and superscoring. In my day it was rare to see a student with a 4.0 average, AP’s were generally restricted to seniors, and even if you took the SAT more than once all scores were reported but schools wouldn’t combine scores from different dates. That meant that a 3.9 student with a 1540 was pretty exceptional.
Now with grade inflation there are schools where freshmen are earning a 6.0 for an AP course even though they scored a 2 or 3 on the exam. Kids are taking the SAT 5 times, combining a 1380 and a 1410 to come up with a 1540. Classes are graduating with scads of kids with 4.0+ GPA’s. I can’t blame the kids and their parents for thinking they have a good shot at Harvard or Stanford when in an earlier time they might have recognized those schools as unrealistic reaches.
I don’t mean this as as snarky as it sounds. I recognize that these applicants are smart and hard working, but when there are so many kids with indistinguishably high GPA’s some are bound to be disappointed.
@pantha33m agreed. In fact I think that fancy privates are increasingly a negative. The stigma of rich kids afflicts them. Totally out of fashion and getting more and more so. Of course, there are plenty of other reasons to go there.
EA/ED and RD rates so far (some are implied or estimated):
EA schools - EA acceptance rates
MIT (EA) 6.9% = 664 admits / 9557 applicants
Stanford (REA) ~7-8% = 750 / ### (number of applicants not given)
Georgetown (EA) 12.0% = 1002 / 8383
Harvard (SCEA) 14.5% = 964 / 6630
Yale (SCEA) 14.7% = 842 / 5733
Princeton (SCEA) 14.8% = 799 / 5402
Notre Dame (REA) 24.8% = 1636 / 6598
Georgia Tech (EA) 25.8% = 4677 / 18124 - out of state 19%; instate 46%
UVA (EA) 27.8% = 5994 / 21573 - out of state 21.6% (3379/15676); instate 44.3% (2615/5897)
UNC (EA) 30.4% = 7867 / 25867 - out of state 18% (2742 admits); instate 48% (5125 admits)
Boston College (EA) 30.6% = 3170 / 10350
EA Missing - Stanford, Chicago, Caltech, Colorado College, Tulane (and others)
ED schools - ED acceptance rates
Columbia ~17% = ### admits / 4085 applicants (assume 700 admits, about half the class)
UPenn 18.5%= 1312 / 7074
Rice 19.4% = 371 / 1916
Vanderbilt 20.5% (only the rate was announced)
Brown 21.1% = 738 / 3502
Duke 21.4% = 875 / 4090
Cornell 24.3% = 1533 / 6319
Dartmouth 24.9% = 565 / 2270
Northwestern 26.5% = 1072 / 4049
JHU 29.9% = 610 / 2037
Tulane 30.9% = 562 / 1819
Tufts ~31% = ### / 2249 (assume 700 admits, about half the class)
WUSTL ~38% = ### / 1850 (assume 700 admits, about half the class)
Many ED schools have not announced their ED numbers.
“RD stage” acceptance rates -
caution: these are inferred from announced overall acceptance rates by backing out the EA/ED numbers where available. The actual pool considered at the RD stage is in fact larger than the applicants shown below to the extent the pool contains deferred applicants from the EA/ED stages.
Where assumptions are mine, I have tried to make that clear so readers can introduce their own and these numbers can be revised as more data become available.
Harvard 2.8% = 998 RD admits / 36119 applicants at RD (“plus a few deferred applicants not included”)
Stanford 3.4% = 1290 / 38450 (assuming 9000 REA applicants)
Princeton 3.8% = 1142 / 29968
Columbia 4.2% = 1514 / 36118 (assuming 700 ED admits)
Yale 4.7% = 1387 / 29573
Brown 5.7% = 1828 / 31936
Northwestern 6.4% = 2320 / 36376
Penn 6.5% = 2419 / 37417
MIT 6.6% = 800 / 12151
Duke 6.7% = 2222 / 33212
Dartmouth 6.9% = 1360 / 19763
Vanderbilt ~7.3% = 2199 / 30146 (announced 20.5% ED rate, assuming 4200 applicants and 861 ED admits)
Cornell 8.3% = 3755 / 45021
JHU 8.4%= 2284 / 27091
WUSTL ~13.6% = 3995 / 29450 (assuming 700 ED admits)
Georgetown 16.0% = 2325 / 14514
Georgia Tech ~19.0% = 3323 / 17476 (gave very rounded overall numbers of <8000/>35600, so this is rough)
UVA 24.6% = 3856/15649 (sorry no instate / OOS split!)
Boston College 25.2% = 5230 / 20748
Notes:
- quite a few ED schools haven’t released their ED rates, making an attempt at “RD only” analysis impossible (Williams, Bowdoin, Emory, Claremont schools…)
- have not attempted any EA with ED schools, and their data are not available yet anyway (Chicago, Colorado Coll, Tulane, etc.)
- Middlebury released confusing numbers and I avoided including them (would need too many footnotes to avoid confusion) - see upthread notes if interested!
I’ve emailed the person at Caltech who gave me stats last year. She’s asking around to find the admission stats for this year. They don’t generally do a press release about admissions.
@bronze2 Emory certainly has released its ED rates. Maybe you aren’t looking in the right places. It’s 31% That does not include ED2, which is too small of a sample to be statistically significant. http://news.emory.edu/stories/2017/12/er_early_decision_questbridge/campus.html.
You actually have to do a little math since the late March press release gives overall numbers. Emory admitted 18.5%in total of 5,135/27,759. If you deduct the 503/1,623 ED1, you get 4,632/26,136 or 17.7%.
@ljberkow thanks I know a few have released ED1 but was hesitant to use those because they are not the full ED picture. It would end up with a set of numbers that compare across inconsistent bases. Or There would need to be a lot of guessing what the ED2 numbers were
@bronze2 I don’t think ED2 is too significant a thing at Emory in either in applications or acceptances. The subset of applicants are ones who were rejected from their ED1 or who are trying to increase GPA to get first semester senior year to count. You would expect an admission rate to maybe to bump into RD, but also maybe less.
I really believe that Emory is 31/17.7 in acceptances among ED and RD, or something pretty close to that.
Some clarifications <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Stanford (RD+SCEA) 2,040 out of 47,450 (4.3%)
Harvard (RD+SCEA) 1,962 out of 42,749 (4.6%)
Princeton (RD+SCEA) 1,941 out of 35,370 (5.5%)
Columbia (RD+ED) 2,214 out of 40,203 (5.5%)
Yale (RD+SCEA) 2,229 out of 35,306 (6.3%)
MIT (RD+EA) 1,464 out of 21,706 (6.7%)
Pomona (RD+ED) 713 out of 10,245 (6.9%)
Brown (RD+ED) 2,566 out of 35,438 (7.2%)
Duke (RD+ED) 3,097 out of 37,390 (8.3%)
Penn (RD+ED) 3,731 out of 44,491 (8.4%)
Northwestern (RD+ED) 3,392 out of 40,425 (8.4%)
Dartmouth (RD+ED) 1,925 out of 22,033 (8.7%)
Swarthmore (RD+ED) 980 out of 10,749 (9.1%)
Johns Hopkins (RD+ED) 2,894 out of 29,128 (9.9%)
Cornell (RD+ED) 5,288 out of 51,328 (10.3%) <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Bowdoin (RD+ED1+ED2) ~935 out of 9,081 (10.3%)
Williams (RD+ED) 1,163 out of 9,559 (12.2%)
USC 8,258 out of 64,256 (12.9%)
Colby 1,602 out of 12,313 (13.0%)
Barnard (RD+ED) 1,088 out of 7,897 (13.8%)
Olin 125 out of 882 (14.2%)
Harvey Mudd (RD+ED) 594/4101 (14.5%) <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
WashU (RD+ED) 4695/31300 (15%) <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Tulane ~6,598 out of 38,813 (17%)
Wesleyan (RD+EDI+EDII) 2,186 out of 12,788 (17.1%)
Middlebury (RD+ED+Febs) 1,696 out 9,230 (18.4%)
Emory (RD+ED, excl. Oxford-only apps) ~5,135 out of 27,759 (18.5%)
Davidson ~1,066 out of 5,700 (18.7%)
Haverford 877 out of 4682 (18.7%)
Wellesley ~1,267 out of 6,670 (19%)
NYU (RD+ED1+ED2) 15,722 out of 75,037 (< 21.0, incl. 19% for NY campus) >>>>>>>>
BU ~14,184 out of 64,473 (22%)
Georgia Tech (RD+EA) ~7,832 out of 35,600 (22%)
UVA 9,850 out of 37,222 (26.5%)
BC (RD+EA) 8,400 out of >31,000 (< 27.1%)
VIllanova (RD+EA+ED) 6,545 out of 22,727 (28.8%)
Florida 14,866 out of 40,849 (36.4%)
Georgia (RD+EA) < 12,700 out of 26,500 (< 47.9%)
Santa Clara (RD+ED) ~ 7,954 out of 16,233 (49%)