Acceptance Rate Calculator
Work out what percentage of applicants get in. Enter the number who applied and the number accepted to see the acceptance rate, rejection rate, and Carnegie selectivity band — plus the optional yield rate if you know how many enrolled.
Acceptance rate
3.41%
- Rejection rate
- 96.59%
- Selectivity band
- Most selective (<10%)
- Applicants rejected
- 54,995
- Applicants accepted
- 1,942
- Total applied
- 56,937
Acceptance rate is the share of applicants offered a place — accepted divided by total applied, expressed as a percentage. The mirror metric, rejection rate, is one minus that. For colleges that also report enrolment, yield rate (enrolled divided by accepted) shows how many accepted students actually take up the offer. Selectivity bands follow the Carnegie / Barron's convention used in US college reporting; UK and global institutions use the same accepted-over-applied ratio under different labels.
How to use this calculator
Enter the total number of applicants and the number who were accepted. The calculator returns the acceptance rate as a percentage. Optionally enter the number who actually enrolled to see the yield rate alongside it. The selectivity band classifies the result using the standard Carnegie / Barron's thresholds used in US college reporting (under 10% is "most selective", 10-25% is "highly selective", 25-50% is "selective", and so on).
How the calculation works
Acceptance rate is simply accepted divided by applied, expressed as a percentage. Rejection rate is the mirror — applied minus accepted, divided by applied. Yield rate is enrolled divided by accepted, only shown when an enrolment figure is given. The same accepted-over-applied formula appears in the US Common Data Set (Section C, "First-Time, First-Year Admission"), in the UCAS End of Cycle Report in the UK, and in the institutional reporting standards used by Universities Australia. The formula is identical across regions; only the labels differ.
Worked example
Harvard College Class of 2027 received 56,937 applications and offered admission to 1,942 students. 1,942 ÷ 56,937 = 0.0341, or an acceptance rate of 3.41% — placing Harvard firmly in the "most selective" band. The rejection rate was 96.59%, with 54,995 applicants turned away. Of the 1,942 accepted, 1,654 chose to enrol, giving a yield rate of 85.2% — one of the highest in US higher education, reflecting Harvard's strong cross-admit performance against peer institutions.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a good acceptance rate?
"Good" depends on perspective. From the applicant's view a higher rate means an easier admission — Cambridge has an undergraduate acceptance rate around 21%, the University of Texas at Austin around 32%, the University of Tokyo around 35%. From the institution's view a lower rate signals selectivity and prestige — Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Oxford all admit under 10% of applicants. The Carnegie / Barron's convention treats anything under 10% as "most selective" and over 75% as "less selective". Outside higher education, the same ranges apply roughly to competitive grants, conferences, and elite job programmes.
Acceptance rate vs yield rate — what is the difference?
Acceptance rate is what fraction of applicants the institution offered admission to. Yield rate is what fraction of those admitted actually enrolled. They measure different things: the first is how selective the institution is, the second is how attractive the offer is to admitted candidates. A college can be selective (low acceptance rate) but have low yield if admitted students prefer other offers. Harvard's 85% yield is exceptional; a typical highly selective US college sits in the 30-50% range. UCAS and most UK universities do not publish yield because Confirmation is binding after exam results.
Why do US college acceptance rates keep falling each year?
Two structural reasons. First, the Common Application and Coalition platforms let one student submit to many institutions in a single click, so application volume has grown much faster than admitted-student volume. Second, test-optional policies (widespread since 2020) lowered the friction to apply to highly ranked schools, attracting more aspirational applications. Harvard's acceptance rate was 11% in 2003 and 3.4% in 2027 — but the admitted class is roughly the same size; only the denominator changed. Yield is a more stable institutional metric over time.
Does this calculator work for jobs and grants too?
Yes. The maths is identical for any selective process: number accepted divided by number who applied. The selectivity bands still describe the result usefully — a 5% acceptance rate at a top consulting firm or a competitive academic grant programme is still "most selective" in the same sense. Yield (the optional field) does not always apply outside higher education, but where the concept exists — for example, what fraction of job offers candidates actually accept — the same enrolled-over-accepted formula gives the answer.
How is the selectivity band calculated?
The bands follow the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education and Barron's Profiles of American Colleges, the two reference sources used in US higher-education reporting. Below 10% is "most selective", 10-25% is "highly selective", 25-50% is "selective", 50-75% is "moderately selective", and above 75% is "less selective". The thresholds are conventions, not regulatory definitions; some sources use slightly different cut-offs (Princeton Review, for example, uses six rather than five bands), but the 10/25/50/75 split is the most common.
Can the acceptance rate exceed 100%?
No. If you enter more accepted than applied the calculator treats the input as invalid and reports zero rather than a misleading over-100% rate. By definition, acceptance rate is a share of the applicant pool and is bounded between 0% and 100%. Open-admission institutions (community colleges that admit any qualified applicant) sit at or near 100% by design — that is a meaningful data point, not an error.