Posted on: 30 Jul 2026
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 2025, three consecutive readings inside a fifth of a point. A number that steady usually describes an institution that has found its equilibrium and stopped adjusting. […]
Posted on: 28 Jul 2026
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 usual reading of such a number is that the university became far harder to enter. For most of the people who apply, that reading is correct. […]
Posted on: 23 Jul 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 59 percent, the number of offers moved by fewer than a hundred, and the early admit rate fell from roughly 65 percent to 44 percent. Nothing […]
Posted on: 23 Jul 2026
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 out January 19, and nothing about the plan was binding. The change looked modest next to the binding early decision programs that dominate selective private admissions, […]
Posted on: 22 Jul 2026
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 describes a competition they will never enter. Texas law, not the admissions office, decides the largest share of the class, and it decides on a single […]
Posted on: 22 Jul 2026
For the Fall 2021 entering class, 40,878 students applied to the University of Virginia. For Fall 2025, that number reached 64,457. One cycle later, for the Class of 2030, it crossed 82,000. In four years the applicant pool grew by more than half, and the overall admit rate fell from roughly 23 percent to under […]
Posted on: 21 Jul 2026
In July 2025 the federal government suspended roughly 800 research grants at UCLA, about $584 million in awards, and followed with a proposed settlement that reached $1.2 billion. A federal judge restored most of the grants across September and November and blocked the payment demand as unlawful coercion. For the most applied-to university in the […]
Posted on: 20 Jul 2026
Sociology is the scientific study of human society: how social structures form and change, how institutions shape behavior, how inequality is produced and reproduced, and how collective action transforms the social world. It is one of the broadest and most methodologically diverse disciplines in the university, ranging from quantitative demographic analysis to ethnographic fieldwork to […]