Harvard rejects about 95% of applicants

harvard acceptance rate
Just 5.3% of those who applied to Harvard this year got in.

Congratulations to the lucky 5.3% of applicants who managed to get accepted to Harvard's class of 2019.

It was even tougher to make the cut this year, since the acceptance rate is down from last year's 5.9%. It's the lowest acceptance rate in the school's history, according to a Harvard spokeswoman.

But that's because a record number of people applied, not because the already discerning school decided to admit fewer students. This year, 37,307 students applied to fill the roughly 2,000-person class. Last year, the number was 34,295.

It's a similar story for Stanford, Princeton, Penn, Brown, Columbia and many of the country's top schools, who saw a higher, if not their highest number of applicants this year. Stanford accepted 5% of applicants, Columbia took in 6.1%, Yale sent acceptance letters to 6.49%, Princeton said yes to 6.9%, Brown accepted 8.5%, 9.9% of applicants got into Penn, Dartmouth took 10.3%, and Cornell offered spots to 14.9%.

Related: Stanford offers free tuition for families making less than $125,000

Harvard said that 52% of its accepted applicants are men, reflecting the fact that more males applied. 21% of the admitted students identified as Asian-American, 13.3% as Latino and 12.1% as African American.

College 'can't just be for rich folks'
College 'can't just be for rich folks'

While the acceptance rate dropped because more students applied, that doesn't mean that the pool wasn't insanely competitive. About 3,200 of the applicants were ranked first in their high school classes.

At Princeton, 41% of applicants had a 4.0 grade point average. Of those accepted, 49% self-identified as people of color and 61% come from public schools.

For those admitted to Penn, 13% are the first in their families to go to college and 45% identified as minorities.

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