It was a historic day for Harvard University. Earlier this evening, Harvard named Claudine Gay its 30th president in the line of succession, marking the first time the school has elected a person of color to lead the Ivy League university. Later this evening, Harvard released Early Action notifications for its Class of 2027 and reported its second lowest Early Action admission rate in the Ivy League school’s long history: 7.56%. 722 of 9,553 students earned admission to Harvard’s Class of 2027. 78% of applicants got deferred, while 9.5% got denied admission. Unlike Yale this year, Harvard deferred many more applicants than the school denied.

Harvard’s Class of 2027 Admissions Statistics in A Historic Perspective

To put these admissions statistics in a historical perspective, 7.87% of Early Action applicants to the Harvard Class of 2026 earned admission. For the Class of 2025, a record 7.4% of Early Action applicants got in. Before the Class of 2025, the Early Action admission rate stayed above 13%

The 9,553 Early Action applicants to the Harvard Class of 2027 also marked the second-largest applicant pool in the university’s history. For the Class of 2026, 9,406 students applied Early Action to Harvard. This same figure stood at 10,086 for the Class of 2025. Before the Class of 2025, the total number of Early Action applicants to Harvard never reached 7,000.

Breakdown of the Harvard Class of 2027 Admits

With Harvard defending itself from accusations of discrimination against Asian American applicants in the admissions process before the Supreme Court, the percentage of Asian American Early Action admits is, unsurprisingly, up this year: 29.1% of admitted students identify as Asian American (a 3% rise from last year). In fact, it marks the highest percentage of Early Action Asian American admits in Harvard’s history.

The percentage of students identifying as African Americans among this year’s Early Action admits is also up — to 14.4% (a 0.5% rise from last year). Meanwhile, the percentage of admitted Latino students this Early Action cycle was slightly down from last year — to 8.4% from 10.5%. And the percentage of Native American and Hawaiian students are also down (rather significantly) — to 1.7% from 3.7% last year.

Ivy Coach’s Assistance Moving Forward for Deferred and Denied Harvard Applicants

Congratulations to Ivy Coach’s students who earned admission to the Harvard Class of 2027! If you’re a student who applied Early Action to Harvard and were deferred or denied admission, reach out to us today to set up a free admissions consultation so you can learn about our services for deferred and denied services. For deferred students, we offer a PostMortem application review followed by assistance in crafting a powerful Letter of Enthusiasm. For denied students, we provide a PostMortem application review. For deferred and denied students, we offer help with applications over the remaining days before Regular Decision deadlines. We love families who first come to us after deferrals and denials because they know they need our help and follow our advice as best they can.