US university admissions statistics: the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT and more

There is no single Ivy League rate, and the spread is wider than most people assume. Across the eight Ivies the most recent available figures run from 3.9% at Columbia to 8.4% at Cornell. Treating the Ivy League as one tier of difficulty is one of the more common mistakes international applicants make.

Cornell, on the headline numbers, at 8.4%, followed by Dartmouth at 6.0%. Both figures still describe universities that reject more than nine in ten applicants, and Cornell’s rate varies substantially between its undergraduate colleges.

Not Harvard. Caltech, at 2.6%, is the most selective school on this page, followed by Stanford at 3.8%. Caltech is small and highly specialised, which is part of the explanation.

Five of the thirteen schools on this page have stopped announcing, beginning with Stanford in 2018 and most recently Harvard. The stated reasons centre on the anxiety the number creates and on the way rankings coverage reduces a university to a single statistic. The figures still exist, because US federal reporting obligations mean they surface in official filings 9 to 15 months later, which is where the numbers in our table come from.

Generally yes, and at some universities substantially so. UC Berkeley is the clearest published example: for 2025 entry it admitted 13.6% of California residents, 10.3% of out-of-state applicants and 6.1% of international applicants, against a campus headline of 11.4%.

Yes, at every school that publishes usable data, by a factor of between 1.7 and 5.7. But part of that gap reflects who applies early rather than when they apply, because recruited athletes and scholarship-programme admits are concentrated in the early round. Our early decision page sets out the full evidence school by school.

Because Berkeley admits by college rather than campus-wide. The 11.4% headline conceals a 5.2% admit rate at its business school. Any large university that admits by school or by major will show the same effect, which is why a single campus figure can be close to meaningless for the course you actually want.

Every row is flagged with its source: announced by the university, or extracted from its Common Data Set or federal filing. Announced figures appear in March or April. Filed figures appear 9 to 15 months after the cycle closes, which is why some rows carry an earlier entry year than others.

Yes. Any institution participating in US federal student aid programmes must report admissions data to the Department of Education. A university can decline to hold a press conference about its acceptance rate. It cannot decline to file it.