“Innovative and invaluable…use this book as your college lifeline.”
— Lynn O'Shaughnessy
Nationally Recognized College Expert
August 13, 2026
Of the 61,031 applications received by Columbia, just 4.2% were accepted, the lowest mark in the Ivy League this cycle. At a school where 96 of every 100 applicants...
With an acceptance rate under 4% (yes, truly), Caltech is one of the most highly selective schools in the country. The most recent complete figure is 3.78% for the...
Back in the ’90s, American University had an acceptance rate of nearly 80%. In recent years, the acceptance rate has swung widely, falling as low as 26% before rebounding...
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...
With roughly 77,000 applications from those wishing to join the Class of 2029, Boston University has entered the realm of the most desirable private universities on the planet. It...
Applicants to the Brown Class of 2030 were greeted with a 5.35% acceptance rate, drawn from a record 47,937 applications. Given that 19 of every 20 applicants are turned...
When applying to a school like Carnegie Mellon that only accepts 11% of applicants, it’s important to keep in mind that the other 89% of applicants will ultimately be...
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...
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...
