As is tradition, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released Regular Decision notifications to applicants to the Class of 2026 this past Pi Day at 6:28 PM ET. For those non-math geeks, Pi Day is March 14th — as in 3/14 since pi is 3.14159265359 ad infinitum and 6:28 symbolizes an approximation of Tau. In all, between Early Action and Regular Decision, 33,796 students applied to MIT’s Class of 2026. Of these applicants, 1,337 earned admission. And while we’re not math geeks, we’ve determined this marks an overall admission rate of 3.96% for the MIT Class of 2026. That means that 96.4% of applicants to this year’s incoming class didn’t get in. How’s that for mathematics? But, wait, there’s more math.

How did these figures compare to last year? Regular readers of our college admissions blog may remember that while applications to the Class of 2025 soared at all highly selective universities, they soared the most at MIT year-over-year. In fact, applications spiked 66% last year when 1,457 students earned admission out of a pool of 33,240 applicants (a figure that stood at 20,075 for the Class of 2024) for a then-record low admission rate of 4.03%. Thus, it wouldn’t have been all that surprising if applications dipped a bit this year to the MIT Class of 2026 after such a record-breaking year…but MIT set the benchmark even higher for the Class of 2026!

As Srinidhi Narayanan reports for The Tech in a piece entitled “MIT offers admission to 1,337 applicants for Class of 2026,” “In addition to comments in a blogpost on MIT Admissions, Director of Special Projects Chris Peterson SM ’13 spoke on the admissions process in an email to The Tech, stating that ‘With this many applications, it really takes a tremendous amount of dedicated work from our entire team, many of whom spent 8+ hours a day in Zoom committee for weeks on end, trying to select the best class possible.’ On behalf of the admissions office, he wrote that ‘we’re very excited about this year’s applicants, and can’t wait to welcome them to campus at the first CPW [Campus Preview Weekend] since 2019 in a few weeks.'”

Congratulations to all of Ivy Coach’s students who completed applications with us this year and applied to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Class of 2026. You all got in!