The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has not yet notified students who applied in the Early Action round to the Class of 2025 of their admissions decisions. Yet, as per usual, we at Ivy Coach have our ear to the ground. We can thus report, based on our sources, that we anticipate MIT received over 15,000 applications this fall. This would mark an approximate 60% increase from the 9,291 students who applied to MIT in the Early Action round to the Class of 2024. Yes, you read that correctly: we anticipate a 60% spike in Early Action applications to MIT this fall. In all of our years covering highly selective college admissions, we can’t recall a time we’ve ever reported such a drastic jump in applications year over year at an elite university.

We anticipate a 60% spike in Early Action applications to MIT this fall. In all of our years covering highly selective college admissions, we can’t recall a time we’ve ever reported such a drastic jump in applications year over year at an elite university.

We can also report, from our same sources, that MIT expects to fill an incoming class of approximately 650-700 students, which is indeed in line with previous MIT class sizes. So in spite of surging applications, a significant portion of students admitted to MIT’s Class of 2024 who opted to take gap years and will thus fill seats in the Class of 2025, MIT — like many highly selective universities this year — has no intention of increasing its incoming class size. Will that make it tougher to get into MIT this year? You bet it will!

Year after year when highly selective universities would tout how the admissions cycle at their university was the most competitive in history, we’d always tell them to chill out. After all, a lot of it was hype. It wasn’t necessarily getting more and more difficult to get into a highly selective school each year. Rather, these schools were just getting better and better at getting students — even unqualified students — to apply. But, as an extreme example, more C students applying to the likes of Yale didn’t make the Yale applicant pool more competitive. But this year, in the year of the pandemic, well, it really will be the toughest year in the history of elite college admissions. In fact, it’ll be a bloodbath of rejections and deferrals — and especially rejections. Including and especially at MIT…