Acceptance rate

Acceptance rate = number of students admitted ÷ number of applicants × 100.

Institutions report applications, admissions, and enrollments for first-time degree-seeking undergraduates. Incomplete applications are normally excluded from the denominator. Yield rate (enrolled ÷ admitted) is calculated separately and appears alongside the acceptance rate in many data products. Some institutions also publish program-level acceptance rates when admission decisions are made by individual colleges or departments rather than centrally.

Example: an institution receives 5,000 complete applications from first-time students and admits 2,000. The acceptance rate is 40 percent. Of those 2,000, 800 enroll, producing a 40 percent yield. A second institution that uses open admission receives 1,200 applications and admits 1,150, producing a 96 percent acceptance rate. The two figures are not directly comparable without knowing the selectivity of the applicant pools.

Yield rate measures the share of admitted students who enroll. Retention and graduation rates describe what happens after enrollment. Open-admission institutions may report acceptance rates near 100 percent because they admit nearly all applicants who meet basic requirements.

Comparing acceptance rates across institutions without noting differences in applicant pools. Treating a low acceptance rate as proof of higher instructional quality. Using an overall admit rate that mixes transfer and first-time applicants when the published figure is first-time only.