Yale University has announced its acceptance rate for the Class of 2027 was 4.35%, the lowest in its ... [+]
Last Thursday was Ivy Day, the date where all of the eight Ivy League universities send out admission offers to the hundreds of thousands of applicants hoping to be accepted by one of them.
As in years past, the chances of admission remained extremely low, not just at the Ivies, but at several other elite institutions across the country. Here's a sampling of the results.
For the Class of 2027, Harvard University’s acceptance rate was 3.4%, the second lowest rate in the university’s history after last year’s 3.19%. Added to the 722 applicants accepted through early action decisions in December, Harvard admitted a total of 1,942 students from a pool of 56,937 applications.
Yale University had a 4.35% acceptance rate, its lowest in history. Yale admitted 2,275 students for the class of 2027 from its largest-ever pool of 52,250 applicants.
Brown University accepted 5% of its applicants, about the same rate as last year. It offered admission to 1,730 prospects this week. They joined 879 students admitted through Brown’s early decision process for a total admitted class of 2,609.
Dartmouth College reported an acceptance rate of 6%. Dartmouth received 28,841 applications for its first-year class, comprising the largest pool in its 253-year history. It was the third consecutive year where Dartmouth’s acceptance rate was 6%.
Columbia University accepted 3.9% of applicants. A total of 57,129 applications were received, the third largest number of applications in Columbia’s history. From that pool, 2,246 students were admitted.
The University of Pennsylvania did not release a precise acceptance rates, but it said its Class of 2027 would include “2,400 outstanding students” across Penn’s four undergraduate schools. Penn said it had received more than 59,000 applicants this year, making it the largest first-year applicant pool in its history.
Cornell University and Princeton University did not reveal their acceptance rates, but a parody in The Daily Princetonian proclaimed that Princeton had denied admission to 100% of students who submitted applications, making “history as the first university to have an entirely equal acceptance rate across all demographic groups.” It also featured commentary by the fictional Dean of Admissions, Nowuns Godenuf.
Other elite schools recently releasing their Class of 2027 acceptance rates included:
- The University of Southern California, which had an acceptance rate of 9.9%. It received 80,790 applications for fall admission.
- Northwestern University received a record number of 52,225 undergraduate applications for the class of 2027. Its acceptance rate was 7%.
- Bowdoin College accepted 850 students from a pool of 10,966 applicants, for an acceptance rate of 7.7%, the lowest in its history.
- New York University offered admission to 8% of its nearly 120,000 applicants.
- Rice University offered admissions to 2,399 students out of a total 31,049 applicants, The 7.7% admit rate was a new record-low, surpassing last year’s previous record-low of 8.56%.
- Barnard College received 11,803 applications this year and accepted 6.5% of applicants, making it the most selective class to date.
- Williams College accepted 9.8% of applicants in this admissions cycle.
These latest application numbers draw attention once again to the widening divide between the standing of a few dozen wealthy schools and the thousands of non-elite college and universities that educate the majority of the nation’s students. While the Ivies and other elites are turning away students in droves, most public and private colleges continue to scramble for enrollments, trying to recover from the loss of 1.4 million undergraduate students since the start of the pandemic, three years ago.
Whether these historic rates mean that elite college admissions have actually become more competitive is difficult to know. It’s possible, for example, that as colleges relaxed their requirements about submitting standardized test scores following the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic, a larger number of students decided to apply even though they might not have had the strongest credentials.
Now attention turns to College Decision Day on May 1, the date when students are expected to declare which college they will attend in the fall.
