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According to 2023 statistics from US News & World Report, there were 34 colleges in the United States that had a 10% acceptance rate or below. Only four of those institutions had undergraduate populations above 10K. Two of them had undergraduate populations above 20K and three of those four universities were in California and New York. Cornell was the outlier with an acceptance rate at 10% or below that had an undergraduate student population of more than 10,000.
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/lowest-acceptance-rate
There is no secret or mystery for why our most exclusive universities are difficult to get into. It’s a question of space. So, you may ask, why don’t they expand to accommodate more students? It’s the same reason that good parents don’t keep having children every year just because they are good at raising them. Eventually, they would exhaust both their resources and patience for raising those outstanding children.
Do you think that the first or even the second McDonald’s restaurant produced food that was exactly like what you can purchase today? I would bet a lot of money that your mouth would water at the sight and taste of the burgers from the original restaurant. That kind of quality and attention to detail is lost as any business continues to scale up. It is a rare occurrence for a hired employee to give the kind of care and attention to running a business as the person who owns that business. The justification for a small, excellent university remaining small is that they can give proper attention to every little detail and make the student experience in 2024 as memorable and likely better than an undergraduate experienced in 1944.
We live in a capitalist society where scarcity increases value. The scarce number of seats at elite universities cause those seats to be expensive. In the 2023 data, most of our elite institutions published prices for tuition and fees in the mid to high sixty-thousand-dollar range. After adding in housing, meals, books, travel and all the other little expenses involved with attending college, paying one hundred thousand dollars a year for a college degree has become a reality.
The next 39 colleges on the US News & World Report list accepted between 11% and 20% of their applicants. They follow much the same pattern as the below 10% institutions, but there are a few nice surprises in this most difficult 73 colleges to get into. All three military academies and the Coast Guard academy were among the top 60 institutions. If you get accepted to one of them, that expensive education will only cost you a few years of service after graduation. Also, if psychology is your thing, The Chicago School of Professional Psychology at Chicago costs less than twenty-one thousand dollars to attend. Of course, it only has 34 students, so there won’t be much to do other than study psychology.
Think about what you want from your college education. Shed the ego and make common sense decisions about your education, not how impressive it will be to get accepted to an Ivy school. These elite institutions are only 73 out of almost four thousand in the United States. Seek out a few of these other institutions that satisfy your needs if a college degree is required to fulfill your dreams.
