Okay, we’ll level with you here: Georgetown doesn’t go through the Common App, so you have to jump through a few additional hoops to apply directly through their system. Their defense? Having their own application allows them to “fulfill [their] commitment to this holistic admissions process” and “allows [their] applicants to best express their personalities, talents, skills and accomplishments.” Our personal opinion? The initial online form and subsequent application supplement are pretty standard, so… Sometimes people just need to feel special. (Get in line, George!) Speaking of special, last year Georgetown had an acceptance rate of just 13% for incoming freshmen.

Kenyon College is a free-spirited, quaint-but-mighty private liberal arts school in Gambier, Ohio. As intimate a college town as they come, Gambier has zero stoplights and is the hill-top home of this bastion of higher learning where 100% of students live on campus. The average acceptance rate is 34%.

Occidental College is a small private liberal arts college in Los Angeles, California. While it was founded by the Presbyterian Church, since 1910, it has not been sectarian. It is located specifically near Glendale, so while it is one of the oldest Liberal arts schools in the West, you can still claim you went to school in “The North East...” as long as you mean the North East neighborhood of LA. Occidental, also sometimes just called Oxy, has around 38% acceptance rate during Regular Decision and 52% during Early Decision. Currently, Oxy is test-optional, and they have even said, “There is no plan to return to standardized testing requirements for any future entry term.”

Mount Holyoke is a small, women’s college that’s part of the Seven Sisters along with Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley and Smith. (Vassar is now co-ed and Radcliffe joined Harvard). It’s located in suburban South Hadley, Massachusetts, within several miles of many, many Boston-area universities. The acceptance rate is about 40% and the undergraduate population is around 2,000 students. While Mount Holyoke says its supplement is option, we feel that no piece of a writing on an application is optional. So, here’s our advice on how to tackle it:

If you are looking for Minnesota nice, you might be thinking about applying to Macalester. Macalester College is a small, private liberal arts college in St. Paul, Minnesota. When we say small, we mean small. The freshman class is about 500 students. Their acceptance rate is around 28%, and they have a permanent test-optional policy.

Scripps College is a small, liberal arts women's college in Claremont, California. It is one of the Claremont Colleges, which also includes Pomona College, Claremont McKenna College, Harvey Mudd College, and Pitzer College. Students at the Claremont Colleges can use resources and take classes across campuses. So, while Scripps might be a women's college with only around 1,000 students, it is part of a much larger non-gendered community of 8,500 students across campuses.

There’s an art to writing the college supplement and writing the Carleton supplement is no different. Carleton College is a small, liberal arts school located in Northfield, Minnesota. There are about 2,000 students. The 2022-2023 acceptance rate was about 18%. Here are some tips for tackling the supplement:  

Wellesley is a small liberal arts women’s college 12 miles west of Boston. Founded in 1870 to provide an Ivy-caliber education to women, Wellesley continues in that mission today. Only those who have consistently identified and lived as women, regardless of gender assigned at birth, are eligible for admission, and the school identity as an institution for women runs deep. For many of Wellesley students, this makes the school a uniquely powerful place, and the alumnae community is known as one of the most powerful networks of women in the world. It also isn’t uniform, despite being single-gender. The campus is deeply diverse, with 40% of students identifying as students of color and 80 countries represented, and 52% of the admitted class of 2027 spoke a language other than English at home growing up. All this adds up to a special place, and lots of applicants agree. The acceptance rate is only 13%.

Syracuse University is a private research university in (you guessed it) Syracuse, New York. With about 15k undergrads, Syracuse has a lively and vibrant campus. If you google “Syracuse acceptance rate,” you will probably see 59%. Take that number with a grain of salt. While it sounds around right, Syracuse annoyingly doesn’t publish their acceptance rate. We have seen estimates from the low 40s to the high 60s. However, they have announced they will stay test optional through 2025, so at least we can count on that.  

The University of Virginia is comprised of 12 schools in Charlottesville, Virginia, and one additional college in Southwest Virginia. As a whole, the university is widely considered one of the best in the country, and has been routinely ranked as one of the top five public universities in the US for decades. Nearly 17,000 undergraduate students call the 13 colleges home, and UVA is especially respected for students interested in pursuing law, medicine, politics, policy, and economics. As a public state university, the majority of students at UVA are from Virginia, with 32% of students from out of state. This drastically impacts the acceptance rate. While the overall acceptance rate is 18.6%, the rate of acceptance for students from out of state is much lower and it is extremely competitive only amplifying the reputation of the university at a national level.

The College of William and Mary is a medium-sized, public research university in historic Williamsburg, Virginia. It was founded in 1693… by the King and Queen of England. Yes, it’s older than America and is the second-oldest college in the US. W&M has around a 33% acceptance rate. That is a little bit of an oversimplification. If you are in-state, it has a 42% acceptance rate; if you are an out-of-state student, it is more like 28%.

Like many schools in the elite liberal arts tier, Davidson College is a small, academically rigorous private institution. Located in the town of (you guessed it!) Davidson, its campus is only about 20 miles from Charlotte, North Carolina. Classes are focused, with an average size of 17 students and a 9:1 student-to-faculty ratio. With just under 2,000 total undergraduates, Davidson has gotten increasingly competitive to get into — the Class of 2027 had an acceptance rate of 14.5%.

Villanova, sometimes shortened to Nova, is a private Catholic university outside Philidelphia. The school is famous for sports, especially basketball, striking architecture, and six undergraduate schools. While they are proud of their Augustinian Catholic status, you do not need to be Catholic or religious to go to Nova. Last year, they had about a 20% acceptance rate. Notably, they also published a statistic that many schools don’t. 50% of their incoming class was accepted without test scores. Yes, when they say test-optional, they mean it.

If you’re looking for a free-spirited, nature-loving liberal arts school where you can march to the beat of your own drum, Bates College might be the place for you. Nestled on the banks of the Androscoggin River in Lewiston, Maine, Bates is a stone’s throw from the ocean and the mountains while offering the community of the state’s second-largest city. It boasts passion, intellectual curiosity, and individualism as a few of its guiding values, proclaiming that “aligning who you are with what you do is the heart of the Bates experience.” As a truly intimate Northeastern school, Bates is competitive to get into: last year’s admission rate was 13% for an incoming class of only 503 students.