Boston College is a private research university with Jesuit origins and a welcoming community. They received nearly 40,000 applications for the Class of 2029, and the acceptance rate was only 13.9%. However, if you read the BC Class of 2029 announcement in March 2025, before decision day and any waitlist action, the acceptance rate was 12.6%. This helps us identify that BC admitted approximately 1% of the first year class from the waitlist.

Duke is one of the most well-respected private research universities in the country, and getting in is unsurprisingly difficult. The overall acceptance rate for the Class of 2029 was 5.2% (elsewhere it was reported lower, but that was before waitlist admissions). For Early Decision applicants, the acceptance rate was 12.6%, while the Regular Decision acceptance rate was 4.2%. 

The first-year rate of acceptance at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is extremely program-specific. Some programs are exceedingly difficult to get into, while others are more accessible. Of course, they don’t publicize many of these details, though. The overall reported acceptance rate is about 11%, and they have received upwards of 33,000 applications in recent years for just 1,800 spots in the first-year class.

Pomona College aims for a first-year class of 450, but sometimes it takes some finessing to get there. Pomona admissions says that they waitlist about 8% of Regular Decision applicants, and the Pomona waitlist has been slowly growing. For students enrolling for fall 2023, there were 587 students on the waitlist. The next year, the list had 680 students hoping for a spot. And in the 2025-2026 Common Data Set, Pomona reported that 716 of 1017 waitlisted students chose to accept the offer to wait and see.

Rice University is a highly-selective private research university in Houston, Texas and an 8% acceptance rate. For admission in the fall of 2024, Rice offered nearly 4,000 students a spot on the waitlist — nearly twice as many students as they had even accepted. The desire of applicants to get in wasn’t hampered by the waitlist decision, though. Of that group of students offered a place on the waitlist, even more students than were accepted, 2,794, chose to join the waitlist. Eventually, 122, or 4.4%, were offered a spot in the first-year class.

Notre Dame is one of the most famed private research universities — and athletic powerhouses — in the country, and they have experienced a significant uptick in applications over the last few years. The acceptance rate for the Class of 2029, in fact, fell to a measly 9%. This marks the continuation of an aggressive trend, as the acceptance rate for Notre Dame has “dropped roughly 15% in the last decade.”

Amherst College is a small school with a mighty reputation. Getting in is predictably difficult. For the Class of 2029, they received a record number of application (15,818) and admitted about 7%, or 1,175 students.

Tufts is highly-selective, and the acceptance rate for the class of 2029 was 10.8%. They do hedge their bets, though, by maintaining a tradition of a long waitlist just in case there are unfilled gaps in the first-year class.

The University of Virginia, or UVA, is one of the most selective public universities in the country. The acceptance rate, though, is a bit misleading. As a public university, UVA prioritizes in-state applicants. The overall acceptance rate for the Class of 2029, then, is an average of two difference rates of acceptance: the higher in-state acceptance rate and the much lower out-of-state acceptance rate. The overall acceptance rate for the Class of 2029 was 23%, but the in-state acceptance rate was 11%, and 29.5% for Early Decision applicants. For out-of-state applicants, the regular decision acceptance rate was 9% and Early Decision was 21%.

For the 2024–2025 cycle, Brown University reported an overall acceptance rate of 5.38%, in line with peers such as Dartmouth and Penn, which both reported around 5.4%. On its own, that figure doesn’t tell us much beyond the obvious: admission to schools at this level is brutally competitive. When you’re dealing with ultra‑selective institutions, surface-level stats only scratch the surface. To actually understand what’s happening, you have to look at patterns over time, shifts in applicant pools, and how different parts of the process interact with one another. And that’s exactly why we dig into this data every year, to help students approach the admissions process with smarter, more informed strategies.