I talk a lot about the college admissions madness and elite universities, but what is the scope of the admissions madness? How many families are applying for America’s top 50 or so universities? What do I mean by an “elite university”?

When I generalize about elite universities, I have in mind the campuses for whom it is the majority of their applicants’ first choice. When admitted students decide to enroll, that is the “yield” in admissions jargon. Most top 50 universities yield 40–50 percent of their applicants. The average yield rate for Ivy League universities is 64 percent. The most in-demand universities such as Harvard and Stanford might enroll 75–80 percent of their admitted students.

Highly selective doesn’t always mean elite. Some universities, such as Miami and Tulane, might accept less than 25 percent of their students, qualifying them as highly selective. However, their yield rates are also low, somewhere between 20 percent and 30 percent. A lower yield rate suggests that these are not the dream schools for most of their admitted students. Selective universities with lower yield rates contribute to the madness, but they’re usually a second or third choice for most applicants.

There are many college ranking systems, and debates about what qualifies as “elite” remain an open question and one that may shift over time. It’s challenging to derive precise statistics because there is no national clearinghouse or public database of how many applications the median applicant submits.

Elite universities are those with rising application numbers at a much higher rate than the national average. They occupy a central fixture in family conversations and social media. They’re the campuses that vaguely constitute some “top 50,” even if notions of a “top school” aren’t about any particular ranking system or “best of” list.

For my book Surviving the College Admissions Madness, I focused on 45 of the most in-demand public and private universities, 34 top private universities and the nation’s most prestigious public research universities.

At these 45 universities, approximately 1.6 million applications were submitted for 279,000 acceptance offers to enroll approximately 116,400 first-year students each year. The average admissions rate for public and private elite universities was 17 percent, with the average admitted applicants receiving 2.4 offers. Coveting these scarce spaces drives the admissions madness.

An average of 2.4 elite university acceptances per applicant is misleading because most students will receive zero offers. In contrast, a small pool of exceptional students will earn most of the admissions spaces. Said another way, there are approximately 22,000 Ivy League admissions offers. However, there are far fewer than 22,000 individual students occupying those spaces.

If each student submits between four and six applications, between 270,000 and 400,000 families are navigating the elite college admissions cycle each year. There are approximately 4.5 million seniors at American high schools each year, so, broadly speaking, most of the 1.6 million applications to elite universities are submitted by students ranking within the top quarter of their schools. They overwhelmingly come from affluent suburbs. At a minimum, competitive applicants pursue Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate curricula. They make mostly A’s and score over 1400 on the SAT. Tens of thousands of international families also compete for these 116,400 spaces, so the admissions madness is a global phenomenon.

Many of the approximately 350,000 applicants will not receive any offers from top-50 universities, forcing them to enroll at their second and third choices, such as Tulane, Miami, or their state’s public flagship university. The possibility of rejection from everywhere means it’s critically important that all students have safety schools and at least one “security” school where they’re 100 percent guaranteed admission.

Conversely, universities seek and compete for the top 5 percent of the applicants aiming for elite universities, representing around 13,000 to 20,000 of the most outstanding students worldwide. An even more rarified tier of 1,000 or so of the most exceptional students will have considerable national and international level achievements, a unique story, and may get into some or all of the highly selective universities to which they apply.

The problem is that no student knows in advance if they are in the top 1,000, and without any guarantees, they apply to fifteen or twenty universities alongside their less competitive peers. One client of mine gained admission to over a dozen universities in the US News top 50, including a few full-ride merit scholarship offers. They gained admission to MIT yet were rejected by comparatively less-selective USC, so it is impossible to know in advance where one might gain admission.

If one student could only gain admission to a single elite university, a broader pool of students would occupy the approximately 279,000 elite university admissions offers. Reforms that decrease the ratio of admissions offers to enrollment spaces, currently at 2.4 per applicant, would signal a more efficient and potentially fair system. A plausible remedy for the inefficient distribution of spaces is admissions by partial lottery, a possibility I discuss in chapter 10.2.

During the Class of 2025 pandemic admissions cycle, applications submitted to highly selective universities skyrocketed. Colgate doubled their application numbers from the previous year, and Harvard received 57,000 applications, an increase of 17,000 from the last cycle.  Nevertheless, Harvard intends to enroll a freshmen class of 1,700 despite most of their student body attending Zoom University.

Widespread adoption of test-optional policies and fee waivers for qualifying low-income students has not notably increased the number of first-generation students applying to college. Test-optional policies appear to be benefitting mediocre students at affluent high schools rather than increasing access for marginalized communities. The total number of applications submitted comes mostly from students living in college-going communities. Despite intensive recruiting and outreach efforts, elite universities have failed in expanding the pool of potential applicants beyond predominantly wealthy families.

Students from affluent families and the top high schools continue to crowd out spaces for everyone else. Common Application administrators have issued “alarm bells” at the rising gap between who applies to and gains admission at elite universities. Universities need to do a better job at coordinating their admissions requirements, bringing transparency to their review process, and enrolling more students to increase access and diversity.