Posts by Andrew Belasco:

2026-27 Penn State Supplemental Essay – Prompt & Advice

Posted on: 18 Aug 2026

With an acceptance rate still above 50%, it would be easy to misjudge how challenging the Penn State admissions landscape truly is. University Park draws well over 100,000 applications and admits roughly 55% of them, but that average conceals enormous variation by campus and by major. Among students admitted to University Park, the middle 50% […]

Georgetown Supplemental Essays 2026-27 – Prompts and Advice

Posted on: 14 Aug 2026

The nation’s oldest Jesuit institution of higher learning welcomed 13% of applicants to the Class of 2030 onto its historical and notably beautiful Washington, DC, campus, admitting roughly 3,500 students from more than 26,900 applications to enroll a class of 1,650. Whenever you are applying to a school of Georgetown’s caliber, where the average admitted […]

2026-27 Boston College Supplemental Essay Prompts and Tips

Posted on: 13 Aug 2026

Boston College’s 12.7% acceptance rate for the Class of 2030 is less than half of what it was just five years ago, and it came out of a record pool of 41,898 applications. Today, accepted students earn an average SAT score of 1500 and an average ACT score of 34, and 95% ranked in the […]

Cornell Supplemental Essays 2026-27 – Prompts and Advice

Posted on: 13 Aug 2026

Cornell’s most recently published acceptance rate, an 8.4% mark for the Class of 2028, was just a touch higher than the prior year’s 7.3%. The university has not released figures for the classes that followed. However, as late as 2003, the school still had as high as a 31% acceptance rate. Clearly, getting into Cornell […]

Duke Supplemental Essays 2026-27 – Prompts and Advice

Posted on: 13 Aug 2026

With a 4.7% acceptance rate, the lowest in school history, getting into Duke in 2026-27 is as daunting a challenge as gaining acceptance into just about any Ivy League school. While Duke University may immediately conjure up images of the “Cameron Crazies” decked out in devil masks and blue face paint, make no mistake, those […]

The Leverage Map: Where Athletic Recruiting Moves the Odds at Elite D3 Colleges

Posted on: 12 Aug 2026

Division III describes Bowdoin College, where 34 percent of full-time undergraduates play a varsity sport. It also describes New York University, where 1.8 percent do. Both admit fewer than one applicant in ten. Both compete without athletic scholarships. On every dimension a family is likely to check, the two schools occupy the same category. That […]

Tufts University: Inside the Numbers

Posted on: 30 Jul 2026

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 sensible first move is to find out what the early round is actually worth. Until this year, Tufts gave that student nothing to work with. The […]

Carnegie Mellon University: Inside the Numbers

Posted on: 29 Jul 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 to worthless. Carnegie Mellon does not admit students to Carnegie Mellon. It admits them to the School of Computer Science, the College of Engineering, the Mellon […]