Last year was one of the most competitive in the history of admissions to the Ivy League. The acceptance rate for the Class of 2026 at Harvard was the lowest ever, down to 3.19% compared to 5.9% a decade before. And your chances of admission at Columbia and Princeton? In 2022 they were 3.7% and 4% respectively, compared to 7.4% and 7.9% ten years ago.
Meanwhile the number of applicants to the eight elite schools – Brown, Columbia, Cornell University, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, UPenn and Yale – continues to rise. Crimson Education estimates that the incoming class of 2026 will set a new record of around 414,000 applications, with Cornell typically receiving the most applications – they received 67,380 applications for the Class of 2025.
