Close observers of higher education might be experiencing some cognitive dissonance of late. Recent years have brought endless media stories about declining college enrollments nationwide and the suggestion that this eases college admissions. A new analysis by the American Enterprise Institute’s Preston Cooper, for example, finds that, with fewer kids fighting for scarce spots, acceptance rates are starting to rise.
And yet any parent of academically-striving teenagers can give you examples of how hard it’s become to get into top-tier universities—and how it’s getting harder. Even colleges that were considered safety schools for certain kids have issued surprising rejections in recent years. That shift tracks with larger demographic trends: America experienced something of a baby boom in the 2000s that didn’t go bust till 2008. That means the last few years have brought a large wave of high school graduates that hasn’t quite crested yet, raising the number of potential applicants for a limited number of seats and making it harder, not easier, to get into top schools. (The situation might reverse itself once the baby-bust kids start entering college a few years from now.)
All of this made us interested in updating an analysis from 2020 by Mike and his Fordham colleague Pedro Enamorado. Back then, Mike and Pedro found that it had in fact become much harder to gain admission to America’s top schools when compared with the previous generation, at least as measured by median SAT scores (adjusted for score re-norming by the College Board), for the high school graduating classes of 1985 and 2016. Here, we update those trends through the class of 2023, using median SAT scores drawn from each school’s Common Data Set submission. (The source used for the 2020 analysis, Barron’s, did not have an update containing post-Covid scores.) Due to further re-norming that took place after the release of the 2016 scores used in the original analysis, the 1985 and 2016 scores for each school have been adjusted to the current scale using the College Board’s concordance table.
We started with the top 100 national universities and top 50 liberal arts colleges according to the 2020 US News and World Report college rankings. Fifty-five schools were dropped from the 2020 analysis because they did not report median SAT scores for both 1985 and 2016, and an additional 17 were dropped from the current analysis because they no longer reported median SAT scores, or for other anomalies. What we find is that median SAT scores have continued to rise at almost all of America’s top colleges, usually by quite a bit.
That finding comes with a big fat asterisk, however, as almost every one of those institutions had test-optional policies in place in 2023, which probably inflated their median SAT scores. Readers should keep in mind that students with sky-high scores were likelier to submit them to admissions officers than those with lower scores.
Overall changes in median SAT scores
Among the institutions in our sample, the average median SAT score for the incoming freshman class of 2023 was 1413, an increase of 35 points from the median score of 1378 in 2016. It has increased by 123 points since 1985, when the average median score was 1290.
In general, schools seeing increases in median SAT scores vastly outnumber those seeing decreases.
From 2016 to 2023:
- median SAT scores for 4 percent of schools increased by 100 points or more.
- median SAT scores for 38 percent of schools increased by 50 points or more.
- median SAT scores for 9 percent of schools decreased.
From 1985 to 2023:
- median SAT scores for 68 percent of schools increased by 100 points or more.
- median SAT scores for 90 percent of schools increase by 50 points or more.
- median SAT scores for 4 percent of schools decreased.
Tougher admissions in recent years
Eleven institutions saw increases of 70 points or more since 2016:
- UNC–Chapel Hill, to 1460 from 1323, an increase of 137 points
- Johns Hopkins, to 1550 from 1440, an increase of 110 points
- NYU, to 1520 from 1410, an increase of 110 points
- Wake Forest University, to 1450 from 1365, an increase of 85 points
- Boston University, to 1450 from 1370, an increase of 80 points
- Emory University, to 1500 from 1420, an increase of 80 points
- Skidmore College, to 1380 from 1300, an increase of 80 points
- UMass–Amherst, to 1380 from 1300, an increase of 80 points
- University of Richmond, to 1460 from 1380, an increase of 80 points
- Boston College, to 1490 from 1420, an increase of 70 points
- Loyola Marymount University, to 1360 from 1290, an increase of 70 points
Tougher admissions from a generation ago
Looking back further, eight institutions saw increases of 200 points or more since 1985:
- Elon University, to 1280 from 1032, an increase of 248 points
- NYU, to 1520 from 1275, an increase of 245 points
- UNC–Chapel Hill, to 1460 from 1230, an increase of 230 points
- Boston College, to 1490 from 1260, an increase of 230 points
- Emory University, to 1500 from 1290, an increase of 210 points
- SUNY at Stony Brook University, to 1400 from 1190, an increase of 210 points
- UMass–Amherst, to 1380 from 1175, an increase of 205 points
- Loyola Marymount University, to 1360 from 1155, an increase of 205 points
College “twins”
Another way to understand this shift is to hold median SAT scores constant, instead of holding institutions constant. That gives us college “twins” over time. For example, looking at 2023 vs. 2016:
- Rice University has a median SAT score today that is roughly the same as those of MIT and Yale in 2016
- NYU’s median SAT score today is roughly the same as Brown’s in 2016
- Georgia Techand Villanova have median SAT scores today that are roughly the same as Johns Hopkins’s in 2016
- American University’s median SAT score today is roughly the same as Boston University’s in 2016
Other SAT score “twins” include:
- Vassar College (today) and Williams College (then)
- Washington and Lee (today) and Swarthmore (then)
- Clemson (today) and UNC–Chapel Hill (then)
- University of Miami (today) and NYU (then)
- Villanova (today) and Tufts (then)
- Penn State (today) and Purdue (then)
Now let’s take a look at “twins” over a longer period of time (comparing scores from 2023 and 1985).
- Penn State has a median SAT score today that is roughly the same as those of Georgia Tech and Case Western a generation ago
- The Colorado School of Mines has a median SAT score today that is roughly the same as those of Duke and Brown a generation ago
- Georgia Techand Villanova have median SAT scores today that are roughly the same as Princeton’s a generation ago
- University of Delaware’s median SAT score today is roughly the same as NYU’s a generation ago
Other generational SAT score “twins” include:
- University of Miami (today) and Johns Hopkins (then)
- UNC–Chapel Hill (today) and Yale (then)
- Case Western (today) and MIT (then)
- University of Florida (today) and University of Chicago (then)
Maybe this is a mirage caused by the adoption of test-optional policies, but we doubt that explains all of it. Though the vast majority of schools in our sample were test-optional in 2023, seven still required applicants to submit test scores. If the increases we found were truly caused only by the adoption of test-optional policies, we would expect median scores at these seven schools without test-optional policies to remain stagnant—but at six out of seven, median SAT scores increased between 2016 and 2023. These increases tended to be smaller than the average increase across the entire sample, suggesting that some of the changes over time are likely attributable to the adoption of test-optional policies at other schools. But the fact that scores increased at all for schools still requiring test scores indicates that these changes are not necessarily all due to test-optional inflation.
With a large and growing number of teenagers graduating from high school, and a greater proportion of them taking higher numbers of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and other challenging courses, it makes sense that the competition for top schools is fiercer than ever.
So, to stressed-out kids, we say: don’t feel bad if you don’t get into your “reach school” or even a “safety school.” There’s a good chance that your parents couldn’t get accepted there today, either.
Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next. Heena Kuwayama is a research intern at the Fordham Institute and a recent graduate from the Johns Hopkins University School of Education.
