Thursday was a big day for prospective students at the nation’s most prestigious universities, as tens of thousands received offers and rejections from Ivy League campuses.
In Cambridge, Harvard College accepted 3.6 percent of applicants for the Class of 2028, a slight increase from last year, when it was 3.4 percent. The total number of Harvard applications fell 5 percent from a year ago to 54,008. The college offered admission to 1,937 students, including 1,245 students during the regular admission cycle and the rest through the early action process.
According to Harvard, this marks the fourth year in a row that the college has received more than 50,000 applications.
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The prospective students sought admission amidst what has been a tumultuous year for Harvard. There has been campus unrest over the Israel-Hamas war that began in early October. Last June, the Supreme Court ruled against the college in a high-profile case that banned race-based action in the admissions process, overruling nearly half a century of precedent and depriving selective universities of a tool they say is essential for keeping their campuses diverse. And Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first Black president, resigned in January over controversies stemming from the Israel-Hamas war, campus antisemitism, and allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly works. The events led many to urge Harvard to do more to protect diversity.
Recently, a growing chorus of voices has been calling on Harvard and other top colleges to eliminate their longstanding admissions preferences for children of alumni. Known as “legacy preferences,” these advantages tend to favor white students from affluent families.
A Harvard spokesman said in an e-mail Thursday that, based on advice from its lawyers, the school’s “admissions readers will not be accessing applicants’ self-reported race or ethnicity data or aggregated data about applicants’ self-reported race or ethnicity at any time until the admissions process has concluded.” A racial breakdown of students accepted to the college was not immediately available on Thursday; a Harvard spokesman said the school will not have such data “until the admissions process is complete.”
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Because the Supreme Court left the door open for prospective students to talk about how race has affected their life experiences through essay questions and interviews, colleges are tweaking what they ask students to better understand how each applicant got to where they are. The new essay prompts were crafted by college administrators as part of their new efforts to achieve diversity goals within the bounds of the Supreme Court prohibitions.
Harvard said that the Class of 2028 students hail from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and 94 countries. International students make up 15.4 percent of the class.
Meanwhile, Brown University in Providence also announced its admissions results Thursday. The university accepted 5.2 percent of 48,898 applicants, which is slightly higher than last year’s acceptance rate.
“[T]he students admitted to the Class of 2028 represent a group of extraordinarily talented young people who demonstrate truly impressive intellect, ingenuity and cross-disciplinary interest in pursuits both in and out of the classroom,” said Logan Powell, associate provost for enrollment and dean of undergraduate admission.
Earlier this year, Brown announced plans to move to a need-blind admissions policy for international students starting this fall, making the Rhode Island institution only the eighth college in the country to implement the practice.
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The shift to a need-blind policy would have the admissions office evaluate academics and other work when considering a potential student, but not their ability to pay.
The policy change was expected to have a “significant” impact, allowing the university to expand its ability to recruit academically, and ultimately allowing Brown to “admit exceptional students from a much broader range of socioeconomic backgrounds,” said Powell.
Most of the few colleges that do have need-blind admissions for international students are elite private schools or part of the Ivy League. They include Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Amherst College in Massachusetts; Yale University in Connecticut; Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and Princeton University in New Jersey. Some schools, such as Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., are need-blind for all applicants, with students who are not US citizens considered for limited scholarships as part of the financial aid process.
Earlier this month, Brown University also announced that it will again require students to submit standardized test scores when they apply for admission.
The university’s policy around tests comes after an internal committee spent the last six months deliberating certain undergraduate admissions practices. The decision to reinstate test scores comes just two weeks after Yale University reevaluated its own policies regarding test scores, and about a month after Dartmouth College announced that it would once again require SAT and ACT scores.
At Brown, the change will go into effect for all first-year applicants starting with the fall 2025 application cycle for the class of 2029.
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Laura Crimaldi and Alexa Gagosz of Globe staff contributed to this report.
Danny McDonald can be reached at daniel.mcdonald@globe.com. Follow him @Danny__McDonald. Hilary Burns can be reached at hilary.burns@globe.com. Follow her @Hilarysburns.