When someone gets rejected from college, they may get emotional or feel like they’re at a loss. But others may say to themselves, “rejection is just redirection,” and look elsewhere for higher education. Either way, those rejected are not alone because the number of applicants rejected from their dream colleges has increased in recent years.
The popular colleges that students at this school apply to include the University of Maryland, UMBC, Towson, Penn State, Ohio State and the University of Indiana. UMD is, of course, the top choice for seniors here, with 323 students applying from the class of 2024. Only 140 of those got accepted, with an acceptance rate of 43%, whereas the class of 2023 had 397 applicants with an acceptance rate of 61%.
This is an 18% drop in just one year due to more applicants across the country applying to the university. You can find more information on UMD’s statistics here. UMD received around 62-63,000 applicants nationwide and only has so many spots available. “The number of spots available stayed the same, so for that reason alone, they have to be more competitive and they have to say no to more people,” college and career counselor Jennifer Macdonald said.
According to Macdonald, when Maryland releases their final results, it will most likely be around a 10 percent decrease from last year, with a 32-35% acceptance rate across the country. “I will predict that our Wootton acceptance rate will look like it’s going down, but really it’s just shifting with Maryland, so we’ll still beat Maryland’s acceptance rate, but it’ll look like it’s gone down from last year,” Macdonald said.
Towson’s acceptance rate has remained relatively the same. However, UMBC’s acceptance rate has gone down. The class of 2023 for this school had an acceptance rate of 89% and the class of 2024’s acceptance rate was 75%.
For the out-of-state schools, Penn State’s acceptance rate has increased since 2022, however, it dropped between 2023 and 2024. The class of 2023 had an acceptance rate of 85% and the class of 2024 dropped to 75%. Ohio State’s acceptance rate for this school remained relatively the same. Virginia Tech had an acceptance rate of about 73% for the class of 2023 and dropped to 47% for the class of 2024. To clarify, these statistics are not the general acceptance rates but are specific to this school.
There is no single reason as to why the percentage drops are happening. A multitude of factors contributed to this, such as the 2007 baby boom. “About 4,315,000 children were born in 2007, about 15,000 more births than the peak time of the baby boom in 1957,” according to an article from CBS News published in 2008. This means that the class of 2025 and possibly 2026 will have the largest senior classes ever, giving them the most competition to get into their own state schools.
Another reason could be that the top schools are getting more expensive, leading students to apply to more state schools. “People who normally wouldn’t have thought twice about applying to [top] schools are now kind of hesitant because that really is a tough [price] to swallow, so a lot of those people are now applying to state schools, which they might not have if we were talking about like 10 years ago,” Macdonald said.
Seniors have started committing to colleges and some have gotten into their dream schools despite these odds, however a lot of the admissions process comes down to sheer luck. “I’ve seen a lot of people getting deferred who have great stats, it’s honestly unpredictable and students will have to work very hard to get into their dream school,” senior Ricky Gomez who will be attending the University of Wisconsin – Madison, said.
If a student gets rejected from their dream school and they truly feel they should have gotten in, they can write an appeal letter to the school. Schools have a specific process for this, where you write a statement with “new and compelling information” that was available at the time of applying, but didn’t make it in. These could be items that never found a way into the application or there was no specific place to put them. However, it is rare that an appeal is successful, as most colleges view their decisions as final.
Schools use a data metric known as yield, which is the number of acceptances that a school sends out versus how many kids accept their offer. “I know last year, at least at the University of Maryland, we were told that their yield was higher than they anticipated so they thought they were going to get more students turning them down and that did not happen,” Macdonald said.
The competitiveness of college admissions could get worse for the class of 2026 as they start applying to colleges next fall. “I think the process has definitely become more competitive over the years and especially being at Wootton where the academic standard is high, in my opinion, it can add extra pressure,” junior Megan Lomotan said.
For juniors, it’s good to start working on the applications early. This school offers programming over the summer to help with college applications. These programs offer group sessions where the Common App is put on the board and students fill it out together. This provides an opportunity for students to get help from advisors regarding the application and test scores. Juniors will hear about these programs around May or June in an email sent out by Macdonald.
Also, now that it’s gotten more competitive, students are going to have to tailor their applications more to each school. “I think…in years past, you could kind of be a little bit more generic…I don’t know if that’s possible anymore, especially for the more competitive schools,” Macdonald said.
