This American College Is Hardest to Get Into

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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This American College Is Hardest to Get Into

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There has been a drop in the number of people who go to college recently. Data from the National Student Clearinghouse shows that the falloff was 500,000 students in the fall of 2021. Some experts have blamed the pandemic. Others believe that the cost of a college education is not “worth it” based on incomes after graduation and student debt levels.

Four-year colleges, on average, are not hard to get into in America. One study puts acceptance rates at 66%,

Authors of this research done by College Date wrote: “Your chances at the vast majority of colleges may actually be quite promising. Most colleges accept more than half of their applicants.”

There are several paths to college acceptance. Usually, academic success in high school is critical. Some colleges look at extracurricular activities. And, sports are so critical at some schools that gifted athletes can get full scholarships.
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Several American universities and colleges have acceptance rates below 10%, and at a small number, these are below 5%. Almost all of these are large universities with both undergraduate programs, and graduate programs for medicine, law, and business. These also have large endowments, substantial research programs, and professors who are among the greatest experts in their fields.

Another characteristic these “hard to get into colleges” share is a very large percentage are part of the Ivy League, a set of northeastern universities that are all over a century old. These include Harvard University (Massachusetts), Yale University (Connecticut), Princeton University (New Jersey), Columbia University (New York), Brown University (Rhode Island), Dartmouth College (New Hampshire), University of Pennsylvania (Pennsylvania), and Cornell University (New York)

Another group includes America’s best technical universities–MIT) (Massachusetts) and CalTech (California).

The hardest university to get into does not fall into either of these categories. Stanford University (California), which was founded in 1885 by California senator Leland Stanford, has the lowest acceptance rate among all colleges and universities in the U.S. according to Prep Scholar at 3.9%.

When Stanford provided the money for what would become one of America’s great universities, he said it was “to promote the public welfare by exercising an influence in behalf of humanity and civilization.”

Click here to see the 50 best colleges in America.
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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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