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Average Acceptance Rate At U.S. Colleges

What Is The Average Acceptance Rate?

The acceptance rate is a percentage of applicants to accept a school in college admission. In general, the high ranked colleges and special purpose schools have low acceptance rate to recruit competitive students. The acceptance rate at a school does not change dramatically. So when you apply to the school, the previous year's rate can be used as an important factor.
The average acceptance rate of U.S. colleges is 73.33%. Total 7,265,272 students have accepted out of 12,139,213. By gender, the acceptance rate of female students is 73.96% and male students' rate is 71.44%
The next schools are the top 5 U.S. colleges that have the lowest acceptance rate. Minerva University has the lowest acceptance rate of 1.02% among U.S. colleges. California Institute of Technology and Stanford University have also low acceptance rate of 3.92% and 3.95% respectively. The top schools are selected with an minimum number of new students (first-time students) of 100. You can view more schools at U.S. colleges with lowest acceptance rate.
The following table summarizes the average acceptance rate in United States.
Colleges The Average Acceptance Rate
TotalPublicPrivate (not-for-profit)Private (for-profit)
4 years or high72.63%77.81%70.49%68.48%
Acceptance Rate by Gender at U.S. colleges
ApplicantsAcceptedAcceptance Rate
Total12,139,2137,265,27273.10%
Female6,996,2854,350,06073.96%
Male5,134,2002,913,30271.44%