“Innovative and invaluable…use this book as your college lifeline.”
— Lynn O'Shaughnessy
Nationally Recognized College Expert
August 5, 2026
In the fall of 2025, 67,101 students applied to the University of Maryland, College Park. Four years earlier the number was 50,146. A one-third increase in applications over four...
In September 2025, Wake Forest University welcomed the largest first-year class in its history. The 1,545 students who arrived in Winston-Salem outnumbered every entering class before them, and they...
Most universities that draw more applicants become harder to enter. Case Western Reserve did the opposite. Its applicant pool grew from about 33,000 for the Fall 2021 class to...
August 4, 2026
William & Mary reports an admit rate near 34 percent, a number that places it among solid public universities rather than the most selective ones. For most of the...
July 30, 2026
A high school senior in Bucks County opens her Penn State decision in December and finds good news and a complication in the same letter. She is admitted to...
Picture a student sitting down in October to decide whether to apply to Tufts under early decision. The commitment is binding, it arrives before any aid offer, and the...
Rice’s admit rate has barely moved in three years. It read 7.88 percent for the Fall 2023 entering class, 8.00 percent for Fall 2024, and 8.01 percent for Fall...
July 29, 2026
What is Carnegie Mellon’s acceptance rate? The answer is 11.07 percent for the Fall 2025 entering class, and for almost every applicant asking the question, that number is close...
July 28, 2026
Consider two applicants to Tulane with identical files. One applies early decision in November and commits to attend if admitted. The other applies in the regular round in January...
Purdue’s admit rate fell from 68.9 percent to 43.4 percent across five entering classes. That is the steepest five-year compression of any university examined in this series, and the...
Harvard received 47,893 applications for the class that entered in Fall 2025. Three cycles earlier, for the class that entered in Fall 2022, it received 61,221. The gap between...
Duke admitted more first-year students to the Fall 2023 entering class than to any other class in the past five years, and it did so in the one cycle...
July 27, 2026
Nearly seven out of eight students MIT admits decide to attend. In an admissions world where the most selective private universities fight over cross-admits and count a 45 percent...
July 23, 2026
In the fall of 2021, Miami received 1,511 Early Decision applications and admitted 978 of them. Four cycles later it received 2,395 and admitted 1,062. The pool grew by...
What does it mean when a university’s acceptance rate goes up for three years running? At Villanova, it means the admissions office is working harder to fill a class...
For the class that entered in Fall 2024, USC did something it had never done before: it opened an early action round. Applications were due November 1, decisions went...
The standard explanation for a falling acceptance rate is a flood of new applications. More students apply, the class stays the same size, the percentage drops. At Vanderbilt, that...
At nearly every public flagship in the country, the out-of-state applicant faces the longer odds. At UC San Diego, the reverse is true. For the Fall 2025 entering class,...
July 22, 2026
Picture a high school senior with a 1580 SAT, a stack of fives on her AP exams, and her heart set on studying computer science at Berkeley. At almost...
The University of Texas at Austin reports an overall acceptance rate that has slid from about 32 percent to 27 percent over five years. For most applicants, that number...
