“Innovative and invaluable…use this book as your college lifeline.”
— Lynn O'Shaughnessy
Nationally Recognized College Expert
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...
How hard is it to get into the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill? The answer depends almost entirely on one fact an applicant cannot change: which state...
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,...
Princeton enrolled 5,321 undergraduates in the fall of 2021 and 5,916 in the fall of 2025. That gain of nearly 600 students is close to the population of a...
July 21, 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...
July 9, 2026
Johns Hopkins runs one of the most active and self-conscious admissions offices in American higher education. Over the past five years it has reinstated standardized testing for its Homewood...
The University of Georgia is one of the more legible institutional case studies in American public higher education. It is the flagship of a state-mandated, scholarship-financed system; it holds...
Georgia Tech entered the 2020s as the rare highly selective university whose national reputation was climbing about as fast as its application volume. Over the five cycles from Fall...
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign sits in an unusual place among the nation’s large public flagships. It is a Big Ten research university with a top-ranked engineering school, a...
Notre Dame is a private Catholic research university with an admissions story that, until recently, looked steadier than most of its peers. Application volume drifted upward without spiking. The...
The University of Washington is the public flagship of the Pacific Northwest, a Tier 1 research university with roughly $1.9 billion in annual research expenditures, a medical school that...
Williams runs a peculiar economy. A college of 2,100 undergraduates in a small Berkshires town competes annually for cross-admits against Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, sits at or near the...
Dartmouth has spent the last five years doing something none of its Ivy League peers has done: reversing the test-optional policy adopted during the pandemic. The Fall 2025 entering...
Few schools have changed their position in the American admissions market as visibly as Boston University. A quarter century ago, BU admitted roughly half of its applicants and competed...
