Vanderbilt is a private research university in Nashville, Tennessee. The school is popular for many reasons, from its economic majors to medical research to sports. It is also home to the oldest and largest private engineering school in the South: the Vanderbilt School of Engineering. Since 1879, Vanderbilt has been offering impressive programs for hopeful engineers. Vanderbilt doesn’t publish a separate acceptance rate for their engineering school. We would guess it is similar (or possibly slightly lower) to the overall acceptance rate, which means it is incredibly competitive. Last year, their overall acceptance rate was about 5.8%. This is a highly competitive rate, meaning that if you are serious about Vanderbilt, you must be a top candidate. There are a couple of steps you need to take to be a competitive applicant to Vanderbilt Engineering. Thankfully, we are here to break them down.

Swarthmore is small and tight-knit. They are very careful about who they let in not just academically, but also culturally. This drives down the acceptance rate, and the Swarthmore acceptance rate for the Class of 2029 was only around 8% when you average out the higher Early Decision rate of admission and the much lower Regular Decision acceptance rate.

During the 2024–2025 admissions cycle, Vanderbilt University reported an acceptance rate of 5,86%, their lowest ever and firmly placing it among the most selective universities in the country. Not a shocker it’s considered the Ivy of the South! But that top-line statistic doesn’t explain much on its own. How is that number determined? What forces are pushing it lower each year? While Vanderbilt shares some admissions data publicly, getting real clarity requires peeling back another layer (okay, onion!). We do deep-dives into the raw admissions data annually to help students approach highly selective admissions with realistic expectations and intentional strategy.

Northeastern is a prestigious private research university, and they receive about 100,000 applications for first-year admission each year. The first-year acceptance rate for the Class of 2029 on the flagship Boston campus was 5.6%, a jump of half a percentage point from the previous year.

Johns Hopkins University is a highly-respective and equally selective private research university that has soared in selectiveness in recent years. Most recently, for the Class of 2029, the first-year acceptance rate was a little over 4%.

Boston College is a private research university with Jesuit origins and a welcoming community. They received nearly 40,000 applications for the Class of 2029, and the acceptance rate was only 13.9%. However, if you read the BC Class of 2029 announcement in March 2025, before decision day and any waitlist action, the acceptance rate was 12.6%. This helps us identify that BC admitted approximately 1% of the first year class from the waitlist.

Duke is one of the most well-respected private research universities in the country, and getting in is unsurprisingly difficult. The overall acceptance rate for the Class of 2029 was 5.2% (elsewhere it was reported lower, but that was before waitlist admissions). For Early Decision applicants, the acceptance rate was 12.6%, while the Regular Decision acceptance rate was 4.2%. 

The first-year rate of acceptance at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is extremely program-specific. Some programs are exceedingly difficult to get into, while others are more accessible. Of course, they don’t publicize many of these details, though. The overall reported acceptance rate is about 11%, and they have received upwards of 33,000 applications in recent years for just 1,800 spots in the first-year class.

Pomona College aims for a first-year class of 450, but sometimes it takes some finessing to get there. Pomona admissions says that they waitlist about 8% of Regular Decision applicants, and the Pomona waitlist has been slowly growing. For students enrolling for fall 2023, there were 587 students on the waitlist. The next year, the list had 680 students hoping for a spot. And in the 2025-2026 Common Data Set, Pomona reported that 716 of 1017 waitlisted students chose to accept the offer to wait and see.

Rice University is a highly-selective private research university in Houston, Texas and an 8% acceptance rate. For admission in the fall of 2024, Rice offered nearly 4,000 students a spot on the waitlist — nearly twice as many students as they had even accepted. The desire of applicants to get in wasn’t hampered by the waitlist decision, though. Of that group of students offered a place on the waitlist, even more students than were accepted, 2,794, chose to join the waitlist. Eventually, 122, or 4.4%, were offered a spot in the first-year class.