Colleges publish the GPAs of the students they enroll. Those numbers are not as comparable as they look, and the most selective schools often do not publish them at all.
Every year, nearly every college in the country fills out the same form. The Common Data Set asks for admissions and enrollment figures in a shared format, including the high school GPAs of the students who actually enroll, and colleges publish their answers. It is where guidebooks, rankings and a great many counselors get their numbers.
Look at what three of those forms say about the class that arrived in fall 2024. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill reports that 97 percent of its entering first-year students had a 4.0 high school GPA. Stanford reports 73.3 percent. Harvard reports 72.4 percent. Taken at face value, that says UNC enrolls a stronger class than Stanford, and that Stanford narrowly edges Harvard.
The same form also asks each college for the average GPA of that same class. UNC says 4.49. Harvard says 4.21. Stanford says 3.94. Two of those averages are impossible on an ordinary unweighted 4.0 scale, which tells you something differs in how these colleges are counting grades. It does not tell you exactly what.
That is the finding of this analysis, and for a family trying to judge whether a student is in range, it is a more serious problem than any single college’s number.
We matched 188 selective institutions in our repository, collected 345 of their filings, pulled the GPA questions from each, and checked every number against the filing it came from.
Colleges Are Not All Counting the Same Way
The form asks two separate questions about GPA. One asks what share of the entering class landed in each of nine GPA ranges, and it says plainly to use a 4.0 scale. The other asks for the average GPA of that class. Nothing requires a college to answer both the same way, and many do not.
Union College makes the problem visible. Its filing reports a class average of 91, which is obviously a 100-point number, while reporting its GPA ranges on the standard 4.0 scale with 14 percent of the class at 4.0. Stony Brook does the same, pairing an average of 92.91 with a distribution in 4.0 bands. Those filings only make sense if the two answers are measured differently.
So a class average above 4.0 tells you something in that college’s reporting is not on a plain unweighted scale. It does not tell you that the distribution above it is weighted, and an average below 4.0 does not prove the opposite, since a weighted system can easily average 3.8. Throughout this piece we say what each college’s own average shows and stop there.
The Most Selective Colleges Often Publish Nothing
Before you can worry about whether the numbers compare, you have to find them. Of the 188 institutions we pulled, 88 published a usable GPA distribution for 2024-25. Forty-two left the question blank or marked it unavailable. Another 23 filings contain no distribution we could locate, which is a limit of our reading rather than a statement about the school. The remaining 35 fall out for reasons in the method note.
The blanks cluster where families look hardest. Among the twelve Ivy-Plus institutions, five publish a GPA distribution: Harvard, Penn, Princeton, Stanford and Chicago. Seven publish nothing. MIT is the most direct about it, writing “N/Av” in all nine ranges and again in the average-GPA box.
| Ivy-Plus institution | Publishes a GPA distribution, 2024-25 |
| Harvard University | Yes |
| Princeton University | Yes |
| Stanford University | Yes |
| University of Pennsylvania | Yes |
| University of Chicago | Yes |
| Brown University | No |
| Columbia University | No |
| Cornell University | No |
| Dartmouth College | No |
| Duke University | No |
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology | No, filed as N/Av |
| Yale University | No |
Enrolled first-year GPA distributions, 2024-25 filings, collected from the College Transitions Common Data Set Repository.
It is not only the Ivy-Plus. Williams, Amherst, Bowdoin, Carleton, Claremont McKenna, Grinnell and Hamilton all left it blank in both 2019-20 and 2024-25. So did Caltech, Georgetown and Boston College.
There are several plausible reasons, and the schools do not say which applies. The practical effect on a family is the same either way: there is no published GPA profile to read. Counselors should stop describing a 3.9 as “below the middle” at a school that has never published a middle.
Why the Top of the List Is Not a Ranking
Among the 88 colleges that do answer, the reported 4.0 share runs from 2.8 percent to 97 percent. That spread is not a measure of student quality.
Fifteen of the 88 report a class average above 4.0, and two report on a scale that is not a 4.0 scale at all. Those fifteen report a median 4.0 share of 67.9 percent. The 71 colleges whose average is 4.0 or below report a median of 27.3 percent. The first group’s typical figure is two and a half times the second’s.
Figure 1. Share of enrolled first-year students reported at 4.0, 2024-25, the 20 highest of 88 reporting institutions. Colors report what each filing’s own class average says, which is a warning about comparability rather than a determination of how the institution built its distribution. Source: institutions’ own 2024-25 Common Data Set filings, College Transitions Common Data Set Repository. Analysis by College Transitions.
Whatever is driving it, a list that ranks colleges by “percentage of students with a 4.0” cannot be assumed to be ranking the same quantity at each school. Fifteen of the top twenty carry a class average their own filing shows cannot be an ordinary unweighted mean, and not one of the twenty explains how it built its distribution.
Below a 3.25, the Class Thins Dramatically
Set the top of the list aside and look at the 71 colleges whose class average is 4.0 or below. This is a consistency screen rather than a guarantee. It removes the most obvious warning sign without proving that the schools left behind count grades identically.
The median college in that group enrolls 59.6 percent of its class at 3.75 or above and 7.0 percent below 3.25. At 22 of the 71, students arriving under a 3.25 make up less than 2 percent of the class.
| Institution | At 3.75 or above | Below 3.25 | Admit rate |
| University of Florida | 94.0% | 0.0%* | 24.2% |
| Princeton University | 94.0% | 0.4% | 4.6% |
| University of Michigan | 92.8% | 0.4% | 32.0% |
| Johns Hopkins University | 92.4% | 1.2% | 6.4% |
| University of Pennsylvania | 90.0% | 0.0% | 5.4% |
| Stanford University | 89.8% | 0.6% | 3.6% |
| University of California, Berkeley | 89.2% | 0.7% | 11.0% |
| Vanderbilt University | 89.0% | 1.6% | 5.9% |
| University of Wisconsin-Madison | 86.1% | 1.0% | 45.2% |
Enrolled first-year GPA distribution, 2024-25, for institutions reporting a class average of 4.0 or below. * Florida leaves its six lower ranges blank rather than entering zero; the three ranges it does report sum to 100, so the 0.0 percent shown is our reading of that, not a figure Florida published. Source: institutions’ own Common Data Set filings, College Transitions Common Data Set Repository. Analysis by College Transitions.
Wisconsin admits 45.2 percent of applicants, and 1 percent of its entering class arrived below a 3.25. Selectivity alone clearly does not explain these distributions, which the next section takes up directly.
A Perfect GPA Is Getting More Common
Forty-seven colleges report a class average of 4.0 or below in both 2019-20 and 2024-25. Comparing a school to itself across those five years removes one obvious source of confusion, though it cannot prove the school kept counting grades the same way, and two cases below show why that matters.
Within those 47, the 4.0 share rose at 37, fell at 8, and held steady at 2. The median change is +2.6 percentage points. The movement is concentrated rather than uniform. Boston University went from 19.0 percent of its entering class at 4.0 to 41.0 percent, and Purdue from 11.8 to 33.3 percent, the two largest increases in the group. Spelman rose from 22.7 to 41.0 percent, Princeton from 58.2 to 68.5, and Wisconsin crossed the halfway line from 43.1 to 52.7.
Figure 2. Share of enrolled first-years at 4.0, 2019-20 (open circle) to 2024-25 (filled circle), for a selected 22 of the 47 institutions whose class average is 4.0 or below in both years, being the largest movers in each direction. Source: institutions’ own 2019-20 and 2024-25 Common Data Set filings, College Transitions Common Data Set Repository. Analysis by College Transitions.
The two largest declines are the most instructive numbers in the whole dataset. Vanderbilt reports 76.5 percent of its 2019-20 class at 4.0 and 35.9 percent in 2024-25, with its class average barely moving, from 3.84 to 3.89. Houston reports 38.8 percent and then 2.8 percent, with its average falling from 3.73 to 3.49. Both cleared the screen. A forty-point swing at the top of the class alongside a nearly unchanged average is hard to explain as a straightforward change in who enrolled.
Neither school documents how it built either year’s numbers, so the cause cannot be established from this data. That is the honest limit here. The share at the top and the class average can move in opposite directions, and without knowing how a college calculates, there is no way to say why. Read the direction of travel across 47 schools, not any single school’s five-year line.
A Class Full of 4.0s Does Not Mean a Hard Admit
Families reach for these distributions as a shortcut for how hard a college is to get into. Across the 66 colleges whose class average is 4.0 or below and that publish enough application data to compute an admit rate, the shortcut does not work.
The correlation between admit rate and reported 4.0 share is -0.34. In this sample, a simple linear relationship with admit rate accounts for about 12 percent of the variation in the reported 4.0 share.
Figure 3. Admit rate against share of enrolled first-years at 4.0, institutions whose class average is 4.0 or below, 2024-25. Source: institutions’ own 2024-25 Common Data Set filings, College Transitions Common Data Set Repository. Analysis by College Transitions.
The University of Alabama admits 76.7 percent of applicants and reports 42.0 percent of its entering class at 4.0. Davidson admits 13.4 percent and reports 40.6 percent. Alabama at Birmingham admits 88.2 percent and reports 41.2 percent. Three colleges whose admit rates span 75 percentage points enroll classes with nearly identical shares of 4.0 students.
The rest of those classes do differ. Davidson reports 73.4 percent of its students at 3.75 or above, against Alabama’s 61.0 and Birmingham’s 58.2. The very top converges while the rest of the distribution does not, which is a good reason to read the whole table rather than the headline number. Honors programs and merit-aid recruiting may help explain why some less selective schools enroll so many 4.0 students, though nothing in this data establishes that.
One fair objection is worth answering before anyone raises it. If a college reports GPA for only part of its class, its distribution may not describe the class at all. Restricting the analysis to colleges that collected a GPA from at least 90 percent of their enrolled first-years leaves 47 of the 71, and the findings hold: the median share at 3.75 or above moves from 59.6 to 64.0 percent, the median below 3.25 from 7.0 to 6.7 percent, and among the 30 schools clearing that same threshold in both years, the 4.0 share rose at 28 rather than the 37 of 47 above. The admit-rate relationship stays weak at every threshold we tried, measuring -0.20 among colleges reporting GPA for at least 95 percent of the class. Nothing here depends on the filings with thin coverage.
What These Numbers Cannot Tell You
These distributions describe enrolled students, not admitted ones. They are the profile of the class that showed up after everyone decided where to go, not the bar an applicant had to clear. Nothing in this data separates the two.
The ranges are coarse. Between 3.75 and 3.99 is a single bucket, so a 3.76 and a 3.99 look identical. Colleges report only for students from whom they collected a GPA, and among the filings that state that share, it runs from 100 percent at many schools down to 16.4 percent at Villanova. A distribution built on one-sixth of an entering class is answering a different question from one covering essentially everyone.
The current form splits the GPA table into three columns: test submitters, non-submitters, and all enrolled students. We used the all-enrolled column throughout and excluded seven colleges whose filings offer no all-enrolled figure. Clemson and West Point filled only the test-submitter column. Florida State replaced the three columns with its own pair headed “Unweighted %” and “Weighted %”, reporting 12.4 percent at 4.0 on the first and 87.6 percent on the second. Ranking any of those against all-enrolled figures would compare different groups of students.
One caution about sourcing, and it concerns our own collection. Three links in the College Transitions repository resolve to another school’s filing and were excluded. Two are duplicated links: Stanford’s 2019-20 cell carries the same file as St. Olaf’s, and Worcester Polytechnic’s 2024-25 cell carries Whitman’s. A fourth, for Princeton’s 2024-25 filing, returned an error, and we obtained the filing directly. Anyone working from these files should confirm the school named inside the document before using a number from it.
How to Use This in a Family Meeting
Read the average GPA line before you quote any college’s 4.0 share. If that average is above 4.0, something in that school’s reporting is not on a plain unweighted scale, which is a warning not to line its numbers up against another school’s until you know how each was built. The filings do not say. The check takes ten seconds.
For the colleges that publish nothing, say so plainly rather than borrowing a number from a peer. A family is better served by “Williams does not disclose this” than by an inference drawn from Amherst, which also does not disclose it.
And retire the idea that a high 4.0 share, by itself, signals a hard admit. Alabama and Davidson enroll classes with nearly the same share of 4.0 students and admit rates that differ by a factor of nearly six. What a rising 4.0 share does tell a family is that at many colleges a perfect GPA is now ordinary among the students who enroll. It does not tell you how admissions officers weighed that GPA against course rigor, testing, essays, recommendations, or activities.
Sources and method. All figures come from colleges’ own Common Data Set filings for 2024-25 and 2019-20, collected from the College Transitions Common Data Set Repository. We matched 188 institutions across the Ivy-Plus group, top-50 national universities, state flagships and top-25 liberal arts colleges, collected 345 filings covering 186 of them, and extracted three items from each: the GPA distribution of enrolled first-year students across nine ranges (item C11), the average high school GPA and the share of students submitting one (C12), and the application and admission counts (C1). A filing enters the cross-section only if it reports the distribution for all enrolled students or in a single undifferentiated column, its ranges sum to between 98 and 102, it reports a class average so comparability can be assessed, and the document names the institution it is filed under. That leaves 88 institutions for 2024-25 and 92 for 2019-20, out of the 188 matched. The full 2024-25 disposition of all 188 is itemised in the accompanying dataset. Findings were re-run restricting the sample by the share of enrolled students for whom each college reports collecting a GPA, at thresholds of 80, 90 and 95 percent; the distribution and longitudinal findings are materially unchanged and the admit-rate correlation weakens rather than strengthens. Colleges reporting only the test-submitter column are excluded rather than ranked against all-enrolled figures. The reported class average is used to describe what each filing says about its own average, never to classify a college’s distribution as weighted or unweighted, because the form instructs colleges to report the distribution on a 4.0 scale and does not require the two answers to share a calculation. Admit rates are computed from each filing’s application and admission counts. Gender rows are summed and checked against any total row; where the two disagreed, the gender-row sum was used, because it can be checked line by line, and the disagreement was recorded. Several filings print residency breakdown rows in the same shape as a total row, so a recorded disagreement is not always a defect in the filing. Excluded and logged with reasons: three repository links resolving to another institution’s filing, filings whose ranges do not sum to approximately 100, and filings reporting no class average. Princeton’s 2024-25 filing was obtained directly after its repository link returned an error. No value was inferred, interpolated or filled. These distributions cover enrolled students, not admitted students. Analysis by College Transitions, September 2026.
