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What do you get when you allow students to apply to college without test scores? A huge increase in applications at the most highly selective schools. On Friday, the Harvard Crimson announced that Harvard had its biggest year yet in application volume - with more than 57,000 students applying for a space in the class of 2025. That’s a 42% increase over last year, representing an additional 17,000 kids now competing for roughly the same number of spots.
If Harvard enrolls the same size class as it has done in previous years, that will drop the overall acceptance rate down to just 3.5%. And even that may end up being high, as Harvard likely will offer fewer than 2,000 students admission to ensure there is room to backfill the large number of COVID deferrals from last year’s class. The regular round acceptance rate will no doubt be lower still, since Harvard has already accepted about 750 students in the Early Action round which represents about half of the expected class. If the numbers hold, that would make the RD round acceptance rate just 2.6% - yikes!
If the numbers hold, that would make the RD round acceptance rate just 2.6% - yikes!
As a result of the increase, Harvard also announced that they will be delaying the decision date for 10 days moving it from March 24th to April 6th. I expect that we’ll see similar delays from other top schools inundated with applications, but it doesn’t make life any easier for this year’s kids, who now not only have to wait longer, but also will have less time to make a choice among college offers. Harvard has pushed back its deposit date to May 3rd, but that’s still less than four weeks - and other schools may not even make this accommodation.
Harvard is one of the first out with its crazy-high application volume, but it definitely won’t be the last. Expect huge application increases at most of the top colleges this year (at least those that have not been test optional in the past).
