In this article, we take a look at the 30 colleges with the lowest acceptance rates. For more on this, go to 10 Colleges With the Lowest Acceptance Rates.

With the advent of Covid-19 back in 2020, the world fell into a lockdown and life came to a halt. Aside from the millions of lives lost, the pandemic had long-lasting effects on the global economy. Industries came to a halt, supply chains were disrupted and unemployment skyrocketed.

According to the Office For National Statistics of The Government of the UK, the “High Contact Service Industries” suffered the largest impact due to the continuous lockdowns, with output down by 37%. These are the industries that are more reliant on physical interaction. One sector that suffered greatly was education.

School closures due to the pandemic brought significant disruptions to education systems all over the world. According to a report by the World Bank, at the peak of the pandemic, 45 countries in Europe and the Central Asian Region closed down their schools, affecting 185 million students.

However, this led to improvements in remote educational services and online learning became prevalent. This created an opportunity, which was well-received by companies such as Zoom Video Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ:ZM). Zoom Video Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ:ZM) shares closed at an all-time high of $559 on October 12th, 2020.

This was a 713% increase for Zoom Video Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ:ZM) from the beginning of that year, up from $68.72. Similarly, the share price of the online education company, New Oriental Education & Technology Group Inc. (NYSE:EDU), reached an all-time high of $197.75 on February 16th, 2021. 

One may think that such an event might cause a paradigm shift in the international education system and drive people away from expensive schools and towards online learning platforms, such as Khan Academy and Chegg (NYSE:CHGG), but this would be far from the truth.

According to Crimson Education, the prestigious Ivy League schools will likely receive a record 410,500 applications for the class of 2027, up by over 31% from the 311,948 applications from the pre-pandemic class of 2023. This is despite the fact that the average annual cost of attending an Ivy League school has surged to about $85,000 per year, as per the New York Post.

Harvard University, for example, reported an endowment fund of $50.9 billion for the fiscal year 2022 but it has done little to address the students’ financial woes. However, universities such as these can also have wide-ranging positive economic impacts, aside from the number of Nobel laureates they produce.

According to a study by London Economics, the University of Oxford contributed ￡15.7 billion to the UK economy and supported more than 28,000 full time jobs in 2018/19. The study also stated that every ￡1 invested in the University of Oxford research and knowledge exchange activities generated ￡10.3 to the wider UK economy.  

However, the advent of Artificial Intelligence has brought about significant changes in the way people learn things. Software such as ChatGPT have displayed the potential impact that AI can have on our lives. GPT3, the version of ChatGPT that propelled OpenAI to popularity, uses over 175 billion hyperparameters and is trained on two-thirds of the internet, including Wikipedia and a large array of books.

It will only get more and more refined from here, thus potentially altering the educational landscape, as we know it. ChatGPT has also sent the share prices of online education companies down after fears that it might replace traditional methods of education. The stock price of US-based Chegg (NYSE: CHGG), an American online education firm, fell by nearly 50% on May 2nd 2023, after the company reported a 7% dip in sales and a 5% fall in subscribers.

This also caused the shares of UK-based Pearson (NYSE: PSO), an education publishing and assessment service firm, to fall 15%. However, when asked by a Financial Express reporter if it would replace online classes or school textbooks, the ChatGPT chatbot simply replied: 

Is Harvard hard?

Our Methodology:

Acceptance rate is a ratio of the total number of applicants to the total number of students who get accepted and is typically represented in percentage. It is important to understand that the acceptance rate for a college is not the same as its admission rate. While the acceptance rate represents the number of students that received an admission offer for that particular school, the admission rate represents the number of students that chose to enroll.

To keep our data as objective and relevant as possible for this article, we have only picked universities that are a part of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2023 and the QS World University Rankings 2023. Then we have gathered the precise data from either the respective university’s own website or reliable sources such as Crimson Education, for the acceptance rates of the undergrad class of 2026. This is a combination of the Regular Acceptance Rate and the Early Action Acceptance Rate.

While institutes such as the Tsinghua University in China and the Curtis Institute of Music etc. are said to have exceptionally low acceptance rates, we could not include them in our list because there was either no concrete and precise data available online or they didn’t match our criteria of objectivity. 

Here is the list of 30 educational institutes with the lowest acceptance rates:

30. University of Cambridge (UK)

Acceptance Rate: 20.8%

Established in 1209, it is the second-oldest university in the UK. With a worldwide reputation for academic excellence, the University of Cambridge often ranks among the top universities of the world. For the class of 2026, the university received a total number of 22,795 applications, of which 4,260 were accepted. 

29. Emory University (USA) 

Acceptance Rate: 15.8%

Founded in 1836 as Emory College and currently ranked 82nd in the world, the university received a total number of 33,517 applications for the class of 2026. Of these, only 5303 were accepted. 

28. University of Oxford (UK)

Acceptance Rate: 13.5%

Founded in 1096, the University of Oxford is among the oldest universities in the world. It is also the most prestigious as it ranked 1st in the world, according to Times Higher Education. The university received a total number of 24,388 applications, of which 3,298 were accepted. It is one of the prominent academic institutions with the lowest acceptance rates.

27. New York University (USA)

Acceptance Rate: 12.2%

Chartered in 1831 and ranked 24th in the world, NYU is one of the most extensive worldwide platforms for learning, teaching and researching. It received a massive number of 105,000 applications for the year of 2026, of which 12,810 were accepted. 

26. Georgetown University (USA)

Acceptance Rate: 12.1% 

Founded in 1789 as Georgetown College, it is the oldest Catholic and Jesuit university in the country. Ranked 124th in the world, the university received a total of 26,670 applications for the year of 2026, of which 3,229 were accepted. 

25. University of California, Berkeley (USA)

Acceptance Rate: 11.4%

Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is ranked 8th in the world. Having produced 35 Nobel Prize winners, it is one of the most prestigious institutes in the world. The university received a total of 128,000 applications, of which 14,600 were accepted. 

24. Washington University in St. Louis (USA)

Acceptance Rate: 11.3% 

Founded in 1853 and ranked 57th in the world, the Washington University in St. Louis is among the world’s leaders in teaching, research and patient care. The university received a total of 33,214 applications for the class of 2026, of which 3,764 were accepted. 

23. Carnegie Mellon University (USA)

Acceptance Rate: 11%

Founded in 1900 as the Carnegie Technical Schools, the university is ranked 28th in the world. It received a total number of 34,261 applications for the year 2026, of which 3,768 were accepted. This was CMU’s most selective acceptance rate ever.

22. Imperial College London (UK)

Acceptance Rate: 11%

Established in 1907, it is the only UK university to focus entirely on science, engineering, medicine and business. Ranked 10th in the world, the university received a total of 28,866 applications, of which 3,191 were accepted. 

21. Tufts University (USA)

Acceptance Rate: 9%

Founded in 1852 and ranked 151st in the world, Tufts University received a total 34,880 applications for the year of 2026. This was the largest and most compositionally diverse application pool in the history of the institute. Of these, 3,140 applications were accepted, thus making it the university’s most selective year on record. 

20. Rice University (USA)

Acceptance Rate: 8.7%

Founded in 1912 and ranked 147th in the world, William Marsh Rice University is highly ranked for best value among private universities. It received a total of 31,443 applications for the class of 2026, of which 2,730 were accepted. 

19. University of California, Los Angeles (USA)

Acceptance Rate: 8.6%

Founded in 1868 and ranked 21st in the world, UCLA is considered one of the most prestigious public schools in the country. It received a massive number of 149,815 applications for the year of 2026, of which 12,884 were accepted. 

18. Tulane University (USA)

Acceptance Rate: 8.4%

Founded in 1834 as the Medical College of Louisiana and ranked 351-400th in the world, Tulane is known for its very high research activity. The university received a total of 43,019 applications, of which 3,614 were accepted. 

17. Northwestern University (USA)

Acceptance Rate: 7.2%

Founded in 1851 and ranked 26th in the world, Northwestern is a leading private research university. It received a total of 51,558 applications for the year of 2026, of which 3,712 were accepted. 

16. Cornell University (USA) 

Acceptance Rate: 6.9%

Founded in 1865 and ranked 20th in the world, Cornell is a part of the prestigious Ivy League club. It has one of the highest acceptance rates of all the Ivy League schools. Cornell received a total of 71,094 applications for the class of 2026, of which 4,908 were accepted. 

15. Johns Hopkins University (USA)

Acceptance Rate: 6.5%

Established in 1876, Johns Hopkins was America’s first university based on the European research institute model. Ranked 15th in the world, the university received a total of 37,150 applications for the year 2026, of which 2,407 were accepted. Johns Hopkins is one of the most widely known universities with lowest acceptance rates.

14. Dartmouth College (USA) 

Acceptance Rate: 6.2%

Established in 1769, it is one of the nine colonial colleges established before the American Revolution. Ranked 123rd in the world, it is also a part of the Ivy League club. Dartmouth received a total of 28,336 applications, of which 1,767 were accepted. 

13. Duke University (USA)

Acceptance Rate: 6.2%

Founded in 1838 as Trinity College and ranked 25th in the world, Duke has a large number of notable alumni, including the Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) CEO Tim Cook. The university received a total of 50,008 applications, of which 3,126 were accepted. 

12. Vanderbilt University (USA)

Acceptance Rate: 6.1%

Founded in 1873 and ranked 98th in the world, Vanderbilt is highly ranked in research, academics and financial aid. The university received a total of 46,717 applications, of which 2,864 were accepted. 

11. National University of Singapore (Singapore)

Acceptance Rate: 5.7%

Founded in 1905, it is Singapore’s flagship university and among Asia’s best. Ranked 19th in the world, NUS received a total of 7000 applications, of which only 400 were accepted. 

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Disclosure: none. 30 Colleges With the Lowest Acceptance Rates is originally published on Insider Monkey.