How to Get Into Stanford Undergrad: Essays and Strategies That Worked
/How hard it is to get into Stanford? Learn the Stanford acceptance rate, admissions requirements, and read successful essay examples
LEARN HOW TO GET INTO STANFORD
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Part 1: Introduction
Perhaps you’ve begun the endless research and campus tours that comprise so many parents’ lives as their high schoolers apply to college. If you’re the parent of a high-achieving teen, you’re likely visiting Ivy League universities.
Have you also planned a trip to perhaps the most famous of the “Ivy Plus” schools, Stanford University, in the Bay Area of California?
While their highly ranked Ivy League peers like Harvard and Yale boast of being the oldest or among the oldest universities in the country, Stanford lays claim to being forward-looking and cutting-edge.
Located in the heart of Silicon Valley, a stone’s throw from the corporate headquarters of Apple, Google, and Facebook, Stanford students enjoy a cozy relationship with the booming tech world, often earning top internships at such companies and even going on to found their own, drawing on Stanford’s extensive network of technologists and venture capitalists. It’s been called “the billionaire factory.”
But Stanford isn’t just a training ground for the Valley. Stanford undergrads might also research in a world-famous medical center’s laboratories or attend readings with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists.
Your child might find her calling in the Asian American Studies or the Chicano/Latino Studies programs, where she can engage with California’s rich history of migration. She might combine an interest in technology and the canon by pursuing a minor in digital humanities.
Or, your child might be taken with the prestigious programs in economics or international relations, perhaps in Stanford’s unique interdisciplinary International Security Studies or Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law paths, while sharing a campus with Condoleezza Rice.
The point is this: Stanford’s reputation for innovation may come from its connection to the tech world, but a creative approach to intellectual pursuits can be seen across disciplines.
If your child finds themselves walking beneath the rolling red Mediterranean-style roofs of Stanford, they’ll have much to look forward to, from a bustling residential life in the dorms and co-ops to evenings spent cheering on the nationally competitive basketball team to many days studying beneath palm trees.
Of course, getting into Stanford is no easy feat. Fortunately, our team has helped many Stanford applicants achieve results like this:
Read on to learn the Stanford University acceptance rate, admissions requirements, and strategies for crafting compelling application materials.
Stanford University ranking
Stanford is always near the top of all major university rankings, breathing down Harvard’s neck.
Forbes: 3
Niche: 2
U.S. News and World Report: 3 (tie)
Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education: 2
Where is Stanford?
Stanford is technically located in Stanford, CA, but most people call its home Palo Alto. Just north of Mountain View (home to Google) and Cupertino (home to Apple), Palo Alto is clean, safe, and home to many posh restaurants, yoga studios, and boutiques.
Stanford setting
Palo Alto’s suburban population is around 69,000 people, but because towns bleed into one another in the Bay Area, that 69,000 can feel quite big. Palo Alto fills up during the day with workers commuting to tech companies.
Much of Palo Alto’s University Avenue offerings are expensive and beyond the standard student budget, but Palo Alto connects via Caltrain to San Francisco, where students might grab a cheap, delicious burrito or check out museums and theater. With some effort on public transit or with a car, students can also make their way to San Jose, or to Berkeley or Oakland, for more exploration.
Stanford student population
Undergraduate students: 7,761
Graduate and professional students: 9,565
Stanford acceptance rate
Below are admissions statistics for the class of 2026:
Applications: 56,378
Acceptances: 2,075
Matriculants: 1,736
Acceptance rate: 3.68%
Stanford has stopped reporting its early acceptance rates in an effort to keep from discouraging potential applicants.
(Suggested reading: Ivy League Acceptance Rates)
Stanford tuition and scholarships
Stanford’s 2023–2024 cost of attendance (i.e., tuition, room, board, and fees) is $87,833.
The average need-based financial aid award for freshman students is $68,308. Stanford covers 100 percent of demonstrated need, and families earning $75,000 per year or less typically are not expected to contribute to their child’s cost of education.
Who gets into Stanford?
To assist you in assessing your child’s odds of getting into Stanford, we’ve provided academic and demographic information related to successful Stanford applicants:
96% of students ranked in the top 10% of their high school class.
Stanford average GPA: 3.96
Stanford average ACT score:
25th percentile: 32
75th percentile: 35
Stanford average SAT Evidence Based Reading and Writing score:
25th percentile: 720
7th percentile: 770
Stanford average SAT Math score:
25th percentile: 750
75th percentile: 800
International students: 11%
Public school attendees: 58%
First-generation college students: 21%
21.98% white, 29.14% Asian, 16.68% Latine/Latinx, and 7.27% African American
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Part 2: Stanford admission requirements
Stanford academic requirements
Stanford doesn’t expect its freshmen to have completed a set amount of coursework before matriculating, but most successful applicants have four years of English and math, and three or more years of science/lab science, social studies/history, and a foreign language.
Like many of its peer schools, Stanford’s is a holistic admissions process. Committees will not simply count up your child’s AP or IB courses, or the hours spent in extracurricular activities.
Rather, Stanford hopes to see your child regularly challenge themselves academically, taking advantage of the intellectual resources available to them at their school — which might mean taking eight APs, or two and a community college class.
Stanford application requirements
In addition to all that, here’s what else your child will need in order to apply. Stanford accepts the Common Application and the Coalition application.
Optional in 2023–2024: ACT or SAT test scores
Optional: IB, AP, or AICE test results
School report and counselor letter of recommendation
School transcripts and midyear transcript
Optional arts portfolio for highly accomplished students in art practice, dance, music, or theater and performance (note that arts applicants have a separate deadline to meet)
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Part 3: Applying to Stanford early action vs. regular decision
Students can apply to Stanford via restrictive early action, submitting all material by November 1st to receive a decision by December 15th.
Your child can also apply to Stanford regular decision. The Stanford regular decision deadline is January 5th with decisions being released on April 1st.
Should my child apply to Stanford early?
If Stanford is your child’s top choice or close to their top choice and they don’t need or want to apply to another university through restrictive early action or binding early decision, then applying early to Stanford might be a good choice.
Remember that, though we don’t have access to Stanford’s comparative early/regular decision data, most schools that practice restrictive early action tend to have higher acceptance rates during the early round than in the late round.
This is not because those schools are practicing preferential admissions for early applicants, but rather because those applicants applying early tend to be highly qualified and well-prepared, hence their ability to apply before November 1st.
(Suggested reading: Early Action vs. Early Decision: Pros and Cons and What Your Child Should Do)
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Part 4: 2023-2024 Stanford supplemental essays (examples included)
(Note: While this section covers Stanford’s admissions essays specifically, we encourage you to view additional successful college essay examples.)
In addition to the Common App essay, Stanford applicants will answer a series of short answer questions as well as write several supplemental essays. Below, we’ll go through each question and provide guidance on how to answer it, as well as show you an example answer that works.
Stanford short answer questions
Stanford asks applicants to answer the following five short answer questions, using up to 50 words per question:
What is the most significant challenge that society faces today?
How did you spend your last two summers?
What historical moment or event do you wish you could have witnessed?
Briefly elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities, a job you hold, or responsibilities you have for your family.
List five things that are important to you.
All of these short answer prompts are a chance for your child to show off some aspect of themselves that might have otherwise been stifled by the rest of the application process. That really is how they should think of it: what about me—not about my resume or my transcript, but about me—have I not had the chance to display yet?
Here are a few examples of mini-essays that work well for these prompts, which are not unlike Yale’s short answers. They’re pulled from the following students, who are composites of the many applicants we’ve worked with in nearly 20 years in the admissions advising world.
Jane grew up in semi-rural Oregon and will be the second person in her family to attend college, after her sister. She’s interested in medicine.
Olga has Eastern European parents who settled in Paris and raised her trilingual before sending her to an East Coast boarding school. At Stanford, she’d love to pursue one of the international relations programs.
Marcus’s father is a pastor in Baltimore. He’s considered ministry himself, but is also drawn to technology and architecture.
Deepak was born and raised in Cupertino, California. He’s worked on his school paper and been a star on the speech and debate team. He has no idea what he’d like to major in.
Here’s how some of these students tackled the short answers.
Question 1: What is the most significant challenge that society faces today? (50 words)
Olga wrote:
We are at risk of eliminating heterodoxical discourse. As our attention spans get shorter and our appetite for information greater, we have less tolerance for substantive public discussion. I think about this every month as I lay out our newspaper’s opinion page. ‘Are we missing something here?’ I ask myself.
What works about this answer?
Olga gives her “challenge” a name. (Hers is a bit of a mouthful, but it’s tempered by the clear language surrounding it.) By naming the issue—the elimination of heterodoxical discourse—she signals to the Stanford admissions committee that she has read and thought enough about the issue to encapsulate it.
Olga also brings the “challenge” back to her personal story. The newspaper is a minor extracurricular for her. But by swinging back to the room where she sits once a month thinking about public opinion, she assures us that there’s a reason she thinks about this issue.
Olga’s approach is better than simply writing, “The climate is changing” or “Nuclear weapons are bad”—both of which might in fact be larger issues than Olga’s choice but which she has less personal, direct experience with.
Remember: this prompt is not an invitation to write a policy paper in 50 words. It’s a chance for your child to talk about something that feels urgent to them, intellectually, spiritually, politically, etc.
Question 2: How did you spend your last two summers? (50 words)
Question 3: What historical moment or event do you wish you could have witnessed? (50 words)
Question 4: Briefly elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities, a job you hold, or responsibilities you have for your family. (50 words)
Question 5: List five things that are important to you. (50 words)
Gain instant access to essay examples for every supplemental essay prompt from the top universities and BS/MD programs in the United States.
Stanford supplemental essays
On top of those short answers, applicants must also respond to three supplemental essay prompts located in Stanford’s Common App under the “Short Essays” section. The 2023–2024 questions, each of which must be answered in 100–250 words, are as follows:
The Stanford community is deeply curious and driven to learn in and out of the classroom. Reflect on an idea or experience that makes you genuinely excited about learning.
Virtually all of Stanford's undergraduates live on campus. Write a note to your future roommate that reveals something about you or that will help your roommate—and us—get to know you better.
Please describe what aspects of your life experiences, interests and character would help you make a distinctive contribution as an undergraduate to Stanford University.
We’ll walk you through how to answer Question 1 and Question 3 here. We have a separate guide to answering Question 2, the infamous Stanford roommate essay.
Question 1: The Stanford community is deeply curious and driven to learn in and out of the classroom. Reflect on an idea or experience that makes you genuinely excited about learning.
We like to call this one the “Intellectual Vitality Essay.” Through the years, we’ve seen students write about a number of types of topics in response to this prompt.
Coursework: Some students pick their favorite class or a favorite subject area and discuss what they love about it. It’s a great strategy to elaborate on something already visible in your application, as long as you’re not simply saying that you have studied Spanish for five years. More interesting is a discussion of that time you fell in love with Don Quixote, and why.
Extracurriculars: Similarly, many students choose to elaborate on some extracurricular activity or job that means a lot to them. Deepak’s short answer on debate above is a good example of how to make this approach. Your child should never simply summarize what’s already visible or intuited from their application. They must always add a story to what’s already visible, by providing specific examples, images, anecdotes, and takeaways.
Autodidactic pursuits: If your child is a tinkerer, a maker, a self-taught coder or linguist or musician or writer, then they can use this chance to talk about something that’s not on their application at all. This is a great way to add a whole new dimension.
Personal, emotional, or otherwise internal pursuits: Is your child particularly emotionally intelligent, intuitive, or interested in personal growth? Self-improvement is another way into this topic. We’ve seen students write about learning resilience through grief or persistence through athletics.
Two more things are worth noting about this prompt. Students can choose between an idea and an experience.
In order to write a foolproof essay, we strongly recommend building around an experience in some form, even if it’s only a slight connection. Remember that your child is not being asked to write a paper about, say, phenomenology, even if that’s the idea that gets them psyched about learning.
Encourage them to connect that idea to their personal biography for a sentence or a paragraph. When did they first encounter said idea? What caused the spark or the Eureka moment? Was there another person who helped introduce them to that idea? Who are they?
Experiences contain in them characters, rooms, scenes, images, and above all, specificity. Your child’s essay is very likely to come across as vague rather than insightful and philosophical if it does not contain some link to experience.
Here’s Jane’s essay:
A lot of people mention measles in the same breath as scarlet fever or polio. It’s supposed to be obsolete. But that’s not the case in Oregon, where I’m from, and where some of my own relatives have what they feel is a healthy suspicion of vaccination.
The summer I first went to an intensive program for female and minority STEM teenagers at Oregon State was also the summer I spent a week with some family members who are extremely skeptical of vaccinations. It was strange to leave OSU and land up at a dinner table where my uncle was decrying not only shots but also climate change and other issues the liberal science geeks I’d just spent four weeks with hold dear.
At first, I wanted to point out how wrong my family was, but when I started to listen, I realized that they’d read a lot—they just weren’t reading the sources I’d been taught to trust, and they weren’t following scientific methods of inquiry.
I still don’t know how to reconcile those two worlds, but I know someone has to try. I dream of being a doctor because someone has to learn about not only the science but also the society the science is meant to help, and I plan to do both.
Jane’s essay could sort of fall under the extracurricular pursuit category, and it might also fall under the internal pursuit category. But it’s so strong because it actually transcends all of the above “types.”
She manages to interweave the personal and the intellectual clearly and compellingly while also displaying an emotional maturity—Jane doesn’t call her family members foolish, but in fact demonstrates her empathy and willingness to take on their point of view.
Here’s what else Jane does well:
She doesn’t spend too much time explaining the extracurricular activity to which her story is linked. She knows the Stanford admissions committee will have her resumé on hand, and she knows she doesn’t have to brag about, say, how selective her program was. Instead she gets right to the business of elaboration.
Her essay includes characters other than herself (her family members, and specifically her uncle; her classmates at the program). She doesn’t spend much time describing them, which is fine. What’s important is that each small detail helps ground the idea in an experience.
Jane makes her way to a clear thesis by the end of the essay, a thesis which also spins her essay forward: she wants to become a doctor in part to address misunderstandings about science. We could call her “idea” something like scientific literacy or public health education.
Question 3: Please describe what aspects of your life experiences, interests and character would help you make a distinctive contribution as an undergraduate to Stanford University.
Final thoughts
Stanford is a reach school for every applicant, regardless of how qualified they are. But if your child can engage fully and passionately with the Stanford application, especially its school-specific supplemental questions, they’ll become a far more compelling applicant, and may indeed find themselves roaming the sunny California campus one day.
About the Author
Dr. Shirag Shemmassian is the Founder of Shemmassian Academic Consulting and one of the world's foremost experts on college admissions. For nearly years, he and his team have helped thousands of students get into top programs like Harvard, Stanford, and MIT using his exclusive approach.
THERE'S NO REASON TO STRUGGLE THROUGH THE COLLEGE ADMISSIONS PROCESS ALONE, ESPECIALLY WITH SO MUCH ON THE LINE. SCHEDULE YOUR COMPLIMENTARY CONSULTATION TO ENSURE YOU LEAVE NOTHING TO CHANCE.