Harvard Acceptance Rate and Statistics

Are you wondering what percentage of students who applied to Harvard University’s Class of 2027 earned admission? Or maybe you’re hoping to examine Harvard’s acceptance rates through the arc of history. If so, you’ve come to the right place, as we at Ivy Coach are purveyors of Ivy League admissions statistics — including for the Ivy League institution that has long boasted the lowest overall acceptance rate: Harvard. So what’s Harvard’s acceptance rate for the Class of 2027, and how has its acceptance rate changed through the years? Let’s find out!

Harvard University Acceptance Rate for Class of 2027

For the Harvard Class of 2027, 56,937 students applied. Of these students, between the Early Action and Regular Decision rounds of admission, 1,942 earned admission, marking an overall admission rate of 3.41%. It was the lowest overall admission rate for the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based institution, eclipsing the 4.01% overall admission rate for the Harvard Class of 2026.

However, applications to the Harvard Class of 2027 shattered no record as 57,786 students applied to the Harvard Class of 2026. The Class of 2027 application tally marked the second most applications in Harvard’s history. Yet because the school offered admission to significantly fewer students during the 2022-2023 admissions cycle (1,942 students) as compared to the 2021-2022 cycle (2,318 students), Harvard’s acceptance rate fell to a historic low.

Harvard Acceptance Rate for Classes of 2027-2011

Below you’ll find the overall acceptance rate, total applications, and total offers of admission for each of the last 17 years at Harvard. These figures are sourced from the Harvard Office of Institutional Research‘s reporting to The Common Data Set.

Past Acceptance Rates at Harvard University

Harvard Acceptance Rate and Application Trends

You’ll note that some trends are crystal clear when combing through Harvard’s acceptance rate and overall application tallies through the years:

• The applicant pool tends to get larger and larger.
• The pool of admitted students remains relatively steady.
• The overall acceptance rate has plummeted.

In fact, over the last 17 years, the acceptance rate has gone down in all but two of those years, and applications have gone up in all but four.

Meanwhile, Harvard has yet to expand the size of its undergraduate student body. For the Class of 2027, 1,942 students were offered admission compared to 2,125 students for the Class of 2011. That said, the mean number of offers of admission is about 2,093 over the 17 years. So Harvard’s number of offers of admission during this most recent admission cycle was a bit of an outlier.

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