In just seven years, the admission rate at Northeastern University dropped from 28% to 5%, making it as selective as the Ivy League. Take a look at the chart below.

Admit rate comparison 2017 to 2024

What happened?

Popular colleges saw a significant increase in the number of applications when covid forced most colleges to drop requiring the ACT or SAT. Before test-optional admissions, students would self-select out of applying if they saw their test scores weren’t within a school’s range. Because grades have grown more and more inflated, lots of students have a GPA that matches that of the highly selective schools, and lots of them figured they might have a chance of being admitted without submitting the test score. Application numbers soared.

SAT and ACT scores

Here’s another effect of the test-optional movement. You can tell from the chart that in addition to the acceptance rates going down, the middle 50 percent SAT scores went up. That’s because only people with “good” scores, that is, scores that matched or were higher than the average for that school, submitted those scores. This has caused the average SAT and ACT scores to skew higher.

It’s math.

I’m no mathematician, but I can calculate that twice the number of applications for the same number of seats means half the acceptance rate.

10,000 applications for 5,000 admits means that 50% are accepted.

50,000 applications for 5,000 admits means that 10% are accepted.

How to look at admit rates.

When you look at a school’s acceptance rate, think in terms of numbers rather than percents. UCLA had almost 150,000 applicants in 2025. About 14,000 were accepted, but that means 136,000 were rejected. Most of those applicants thought they were qualified enough to have some chance of being admitted. Admissions officers of highly selective schools frequently say that the majority of applicants—two-thirds or more—are admissable, but they can only accommodate a certain number.

Yield

Schools admit more than the number they need to enroll, hoping that the right number will deposit and enroll at that school. For example, a state flagship with 30,000 undergraduates admits about 11,000, expecting to enroll 5,500 in their freshman class. If they are on target, their yield would be 50 percent. Generally, the more selective the school, the higher their yield. Harvard’s admit rate is 4 percent, and their yield is 83 percent.

Why class rank doesn’t match selectivity

Being in the top 20 percent of your class doesn’t mean you’ll be competitive at a school with a 20 percent admit rate, and that’s because class rank measures how you compare to your own classmates, not to the applicant pool of a highly selective school. Nearly every applicant to that school is already coming from the top of their own class. Admissions officers read your rank in the context of your school’s profile, and one school can be more rigorous than another. In the end, schools with low admit rates aren’t simply admitting the highest-ranked students—they’re building a class, weighing essays, extracurriculars, recommendations, and institutional priorities alongside academics. Mathematically, if only 20 percent of applicants are admitted, and most of those applicants are already top students at their own schools, then 80 percent of “top of the class” students applying will still be denied.

Why applying to 10 highly rejective schools doesn’t raise your odds

It’s tempting to think that applying to ten highly rejective schools—or all eight Ivies—stacks the odds in your favor. It doesn’t, and here’s why. Buying ten lottery tickets really does increase your odds of winning, because each ticket is an independent draw. But applying to ten highly rejective schools isn’t like buying ten lottery tickets—it’s more like handing the same lottery ticket to ten different judges and asking each one to evaluate it.

If a student’s profile has a real gap relative to what a school like this is looking for—rigor, scores, a distinguishing hook—that same gap shows up in front of every similarly selective school, because they’re all drawing from the same tiny pool of applicants and applying similarly demanding standards. If nine out of ten similarly selective judges would pass on a file, adding a tenth judge to the panel rarely changes the verdict. This logic loosens when a student has a genuine, distinctive hook—a nationally recruited athlete, for example—because different schools may value that hook differently. But for most students without that kind of singular hook, adding more reach schools to the list doesn’t meaningfully change the odds. It just adds more work.

What you can do to stay sane

Even though it seems all you hear about is how hard it is to get into college today, the truth is that most colleges accept most of their applicants. Colleges have their job: to create the best class they can in the context of their individual institutional priorities. Because schools are building a class, the right list for you isn’t about beating the highly rejective admission rates—it’s about finding places that want what you offer, places where you can thrive and grow. Make sure you have a balanced list of colleges, one that ranges from more selective to less selective (reach/target/likely), and you’ll have plenty of acceptances to choose from.