Just Released: Yale’s Acceptance Rate

See highlights from Yale’s official announcement below:

Yale College admitted 2,275 students to the class of 2027 from its largest-ever pool of 52,250 applicants, the Office of Undergraduate Admissions announced on Thursday.

776 students were admitted during the early action round and 66 matched through the QuestBridge National College Match program. The remaining 1,433 received their offers of admissions Thursday. An additional 1,145 applicants were offered spots on the waitlist.

The admitted cohort overall includes students from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, four United States territories and 78 countries. The admissions office withholds detailed statistics about the demographics of the applicant pool as well as the group of admitted students each year, but told the News it would release a profile of matriculates in August. 

The number of applicants is up by nearly 50 percent compared to the pool of students that sought entry to the class of 2024. Quinlan attributed this shift to the University’s choice to adopt a test-optional policy in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which the admissions office has renewed for each of the intervening application cycles. Last month, the admissions office extended its test-optional policy through to class of 2028’s application cycle, with plans to decide on a long-term testing policy in the winter of 2024.

The 4.35 percent acceptance rate for the class for 2027 is the lowest in recent history, down from 4.46 percent for the class of 2026, 4.62 for the class of 2025, 6.54 percent for the class of 2024 and 5.91 for the class of 2023.

According to the admissions office, the target size for the first-year class has rested between 1,550 and 1,575 students since the new residential colleges — Pauli Murray and Benjamin Franklin Colleges — opened in 2017.

Newly-admitted students who choose to join the class of 2027 will be joined by an additional 54 students who were originally admitted to the class of 2026 — the current first-year class — but chose to postpone their matriculation for one year.

TTA Takeaway: For the 1,145 students offered a spot on Yale’s waitlist, the odds of acceptance are extremely low, especially given the 54 students who deferred their acceptance last year (we expect between 0-20 students will ultimately get off the waitlist).