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%.
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%.
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.
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. More than 43% of those who applied scored a 700 or higher on their SAT math test, and more than 36% scored above 700 on the critical reading section.
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.
