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Are you considering applying to college and are looking at applying to some highly competitive schools? This guide is here to provide you with a list of the top colleges with the lowest acceptance rates in the US so that you can plan your applications accordingly. The list below contains the most recent data for students entering college in the Fall 2024 semester.
Lowest Acceptance Rate Colleges
Minerva University (San Francisco, California) – 1%
California Institute of Technology (Caltech) (Pasadena, California) – 3%
Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts) – 3%
Princeton University (Princeton, New Jersey) – 4%
Columbia University (New York, New York) – 4%
MIT (Cambridge, Massachusetts) – 5%
Stanford University (Stanford, California) – 5%
Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut) – 5%
Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island) – 5%
Duke University (Durham, North Carolina) – 5%
Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, Maryland) – 5%
University of Chicago (Chicago, Illinois) – 6%
University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) – 6%
Pomona College (Claremont, California) – 7%
Swarthmore College (Swarthmore, Pennsylvania) – 7%
Bowdoin College (Brunswick, Maine) – 7%
Barnard College (New York, New York) – 7%
Colby College (Waterville, Maine) – 7%
Amherst College (Amherst, Massachusetts) – 9%
University of Southern California (USC) (Los Angeles, California) – 9%
Williams College (Williamstown, Massachusetts) – 9%
Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois) – 8%
Rice University (Houston, Texas) – 8%
New York University (NYU) (New York, New York) – 8%
UCLA (Los Angeles, California) – 10%
Claremont McKenna College (Claremont, California) – 10%
Tufts University (Medford, Massachusetts) – 10%
University of Notre Dame (Notre Dame, Indiana) – 11%
Boston University (Boston, Massachusetts) – 11%
Hamilton College (Clinton, New York) – 11.8%
Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tennessee) – 12%
Georgetown University (Washington, D.C.) – 12%
Middlebury College (Middlebury, Vermont) – 13%
Washington University in St. Louis (St. Louis, Missouri) – 13%
Harvey Mudd College (Claremont, California) – 14%
UC Berkeley (Berkeley, California) – 14%
Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia) – 14%
Davidson College (Davidson, North Carolina) – 18%
Macalester College (Saint Paul, Minnesota) – 20%
Vassar College (Poughkeepsie, New York) – 20%
Carleton College (Northfield, Minnesota) – 20%
Washington and Lee University (Lexington, Virginia) – 20%
Grinnell College (Grinnell, Iowa) – 20%
Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut) – 16%
Wellesley College (Wellesley, Massachusetts) – 21%
Oberlin College (Oberlin, Ohio) – 24%
Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) – 24.6%
Haverford College (Haverford, Pennsylvania) – 24.7%
Boston College (Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts) – 15%
College of William and Mary (Williamsburg, Virginia) – 37%
We hope this guide has helped you identify the lowest acceptance rate colleges in the US. Good luck with your college applications!
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