It’s a wrap on the 2020-2021 admissions cycle for Northwestern University as the university has notified all Regular Decision applicants of their decisions and released its admissions statistics for the Class of 2025. In all, between the Early Decision and Regular Decision rounds, 47,633 students applied to Northwestern University’s Class of 2025. 6.8% of these students, or approximately 3,239, earned admission to the Evanston, Illinois-based university. To put these figures in historical perspective, for the Class of 2024, 39,261 students applied to Northwestern of whom 3,542 earned admission (or an overall admission rate of 9%). The admission rate stood at 8.9% for the Class of 2023 and 8.4% (the previous all-time low) for the Class of 2022.

As Diego Ramos-Bechara reports for The Daily Northwestern in a piece entitled “Northwestern’s acceptance rate falls to 6.8 percent, lowest in University history,” “This year’s acceptance rate is a steep decrease from the Class of 2024’s rate of 9.3 percent and marks the lowest in University history. The University received 2,855 transfer applications and expects to release results in May, [Northwestern spokesman Jon] Yates said. From 2010 to 2018, the University saw a continuous decline in its acceptance rate, dropping from 23.1 percent to 8.4 percent. In the last two application cycles, this trend reversed. The classes of 2023 and 2024 saw acceptance rates of 8.9 percent and 9.3 percent, respectively. The current acceptance rate of 6.8 percent is in part due to an increase in applications, as the University received about 8,730 more applications than last year…To account for the hardships inflicted by COVID-19, NU offered a test-optional admissions policy in the 2021 admissions cycle, meaning applicants could elect whether to include standardized test scores with their applications. The University has extended its test-optional policy for the 2022 admissions cycle but has yet to comment on whether or not the policy will stay once the pandemic ends.”

And while that’s all well and good that Northwestern has extended its “test-optional” admissions policy, notably absent from the admissions data for the Class of 2025 is the percentage of students who earned admission without test scores. If students with great scores enjoy no advantage under “test-optional” admissions policies over students with no scores, why would Northwestern not release this important data point? We thus hereby call on Northwestern to do so in the weeks ahead as more admissions figures are released by the university. In any case, congratulations to our students at Ivy Coach who earned admission to Northwestern University’s Class of 2025 in spite of an over 21% jump in applications!