It’s been getting worse every year. For a variety of reasons, elite college admissions are becoming an impossible dream—even for perfect students. Today, 19 of 20 applications submitted to nearly all of the schools in the Ivy League are rejected. But the super elite aren’t alone. Consider Northeastern University, a popular Boston-based school with 16,000 undergraduates. Until the 1990s it was largely considered a commuter college. Over the last ten years its admissions rate has plunged from 32% to 5.2% in 2024, for its Class of 2028. The same holds for nearby Boston University—its acceptance rate has fallen to 10.8% down from nearly 60% a decade ago. Ditto for New York University, which announced it accepted only 7.7% of more than 120,000 applications that came in for its undergraduate class of 2029. A decade ago it accepted 35% of its applicants. Tulane University, another hot school, had an admission rate of more than 60% in the early 2000s. Last year it was 8.5%.

Lower admissions rates lead to more stress and more heartbreak. As of March 1, 1.4 million students submitted more than 8.5 million college applications via the Common App—a 4% annual increase in the number of applicants and a 6% increase over last year’s application volume. TikTok and Reddit are full of posts from crestfallen students who were denied by their dream schools and others that were rejected by every college they applied to. Some have taken to posting videos celebrating their misses with “rejection cakes.”

The traditional May 1 decision deadline has come and gone, but it’s not too late to secure a college acceptance for the fall term. Through May and even June, hundreds of colleges report to the National Association for College Admission Counselors that they still have seats available in their incoming freshman classes. As of Wednesday, 281 colleges told NACAC they’re still seeking applicants. Many of these colleges are excellent and in an effort to highlight the best colleges in need of freshmen, Forbes has culled the list for schools that appear on the 2025 Forbes Top Colleges list, as well as the Princeton Review’s 2025 list of Best Colleges.

If you had your heart set on Maine’s Colby College (7% acceptance rate) or Vermont’s

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