Check a figure
What thirty of the world's most highly ranked universities publish about admissions
Complete institution-wide undergraduate admissions figures were verified for 13 of the 30 universities in the QS World University Rankings 2027 top-30 band. The remaining cases reveal substantial differences in what global admissions systems count, publish and make comparable.
Sampling frame: QS World University Rankings 2027, published 18 June 2026. All sources retrieved and reverified 10 September 2026.
Census coverage
The record itself is the finding
Every year a family is told that a place at a particular university is close to impossible to win. Almost always the number attached to that claim is an admission rate. Almost never is anyone told what that rate counts.
Elite Careers Strategy set out to test whether a like-for-like admissions figure can be assembled across the world's most highly ranked universities. We took the thirty institutions placed from 1 to 30 in the QS World University Rankings 2027, published on 18 June 2026, and went to each institution's own published record. No QS score, indicator or rank position was used as evidence about admissions.
For thirteen we verified a complete institution-wide undergraduate pair: a published application count and a published count of positive admissions decisions, from the same institution, for the same cycle. For seventeen we did not. That is the result.
Why seventeen records are not complete
Four reasons. The institution publishes part of the pair but not all of it. The official data we needed was not accessible to us. No pair could be located. Or the university operates an admissions architecture in which an institution-wide rate is not a meaningful object at all.
That last category deserves emphasis. At ETH Zurich and EPFL, a domestic applicant holding the right school-leaving qualification is entitled to enter, so there is no institution-wide competitive selection to measure. At the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University, admission happens at programme level on national examination results. At Peking, Tsinghua and Fudan, places are allocated against province and programme quotas through the gaokao. An admission rate for these institutions would not be a smaller number than Harvard's. It would be a category error.
What ECS records is what one review, conducted on 10 September 2026 from publicly reachable official sources, was able to confirm.
The spread is architecture before it is competition
Institutions count different things. Some count applicants; others count applications. Some publish offers; others publish admissions. Those are not the same object, and this page does not silently convert one into the other.
A single example shows why the decision point matters. Cambridge published 4,893 offers for the 2025 cycle and 3,669 acceptances. A UK offer is conditional on examination results still to come. A US admission is not conditional in the same way. Reading a UK offer rate against a US admission rate treats two different stages of two different processes as one measurement.
Every complete record located in this review came through one of three comparatively structured reporting environments: the US Common Data Set or official institutional reporting ecosystem, the UK's UCAS-linked reporting system, or McGill's voluntary publication of its admissions funnel. That is a finding about reporting infrastructure, not about candour.
Thirteen complete records, grouped by admissions architecture
Read with that warning in front of it: among the thirteen universities with complete records the reported positive-decision rate ranged from 3.80% to 47.55%, equivalent to approximately 2.1 to 26.3 applications or applicants per recorded positive decision. That range is a property of thirteen records drawn from five different admissions architectures. It is not an ordering, not a difficulty scale and not a ranking.
US institution-wide, applicants and admissions
One institution-wide application, counted as applicants. The decision is an unconditional admission. Figures come from each institution's Common Data Set Section C1 or its own published admissions statistics.
| Institution | Cycle | Counting unit | Applications or applicants | Positive decisions | Decision unit, in the institution's own words | Applications or applicants per recorded positive decision |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stanford University ECS-derived | Fall 2025 (CDS 2025-2026) | Applicants | 60,646 | 2,302 | who were admitted (1,162 + 1,140 + 0) | 26.34 |
| Harvard University | Class of 2029, autumn 2025 | Applicants | 47,893 | 2,003 | Admitted (includes 75 admitted from the waiting list) | 23.91 |
| Princeton University | Fall 2025 (CDS 2025-26) | who applied | 42,303 | 1,868 | Total first-time, first-year (degree-seeking) who were admitted | 22.65 |
| Johns Hopkins University | Fall 2025 (CDS 2025-26) | who applied | 50,259 | 3,072 | Total first-time, first-year (degree-seeking) who were admitted | 16.36 |
| Cornell University | Fall 2025 (CDS 2025-2026) | Applicants | 72,523 | 6,077 | Total first-time, first-year students who were admitted (published total, C.117) | 11.93 |
| University of California, Berkeley | Fall 2025 (CDS 2025-26) | who applied | 126,864 | 14,524 | Total first-time, first-year (degree-seeking) who were admitted | 8.73 |
US institution-wide, applications and admissions
The same reporting ecosystem, but the denominator counts applications rather than applicants. An application count and an applicant count are not the same object and are not converted here. The decision each institution publishes differs too, and each row states it in that institution's own words.
| Institution | Cycle | Counting unit | Applications or applicants | Positive decisions | Decision unit, in the institution's own words | Applications or applicants per recorded positive decision |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yale University | Fall 2025 (Year Entered 2025, Class of 2029) | Total Applications | 50,265 | 2,388 | Total Admits | 21.05 |
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology | Class of 2029, autumn 2025 | Applications | 29,281 | 1,334 | Offers of admission | 21.95 |
| University of Pennsylvania | Fall 2025, Class of 2029 | Applications | 72,544 | 3,570 | were offered admission | 20.32 |
UK UCAS, applications and conditional offers
A UK offer is conditional on examination results still to come, so it sits at a different stage from a US admission. Cambridge published 4,893 offers for the 2025 cycle and 3,669 acceptances.
| Institution | Cycle | Counting unit | Applications or applicants | Positive decisions | Decision unit, in the institution's own words | Applications or applicants per recorded positive decision |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| University of Oxford | 2025 cycle (UCAS applications by 15 October 2024, mostly for entry October 2025) | Applications | 23,329 | 3,891 | offers made | 6.00 |
| University of Cambridge | 2025 cycle (applications from September 2024) | Applications | 22,513 | 4,893 | Offers | 4.60 |
UK UCAS, applications and admissions
Imperial publishes admissions rather than offers, so its ratio is applications to admissions. It is not an offer rate and is not directly comparable with Oxford or Cambridge.
| Institution | Cycle | Counting unit | Applications or applicants | Positive decisions | Decision unit, in the institution's own words | Applications or applicants per recorded positive decision |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Imperial College London | 2025-26 entry | Applications | 32,214 | 3,259 | New admissions 2025-26 entry | 9.88 |
Other voluntarily published institutional funnels
McGill publishes an institution-wide applicants, offers and entering class funnel by choice rather than under a shared reporting standard. Its figure is an offer rate, not an admission rate, its offers may include conditional offers, and its undergraduate count bundles professional-faculty entry.
| Institution | Cycle | Counting unit | Applications or applicants | Positive decisions | Decision unit, in the institution's own words | Applications or applicants per recorded positive decision |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| McGill University | Fall 2025 | Applicants | 38,135 | 18,132 | Offers | 2.10 |
What this evidence cannot support
No defensible global admissions-selectivity league table can be constructed from these records. Seventeen institutions lack a verified complete pair, and the thirteen complete records span materially different units, decision points and admissions architectures.
QS rank and published undergraduate admissions ratios measure different things. The admissions figures here must not be read as a proxy for ranking position or institutional quality. No association between rank and admissions ratio is calculated, because thirteen records spanning five admissions architectures and two counting units cannot support one.
We are publishing the gaps rather than filling them with estimates.
What ECS could not verify on employer recruitment pages
Across the public recruitment pages of 13 named elite employers reviewed by ECS on 10 September 2026, ECS could not verify both an application-volume figure and a programme-intake figure covering the same programme, geography and cycle.
The thirteen employers reviewed were JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup, McKinsey & Company, Bain & Company, Boston Consulting Group, Freshfields, Clifford Chance, A&O Shearman, Linklaters and Slaughter and May.
No numerical comparison between any university and any employer is made here, because no employer numerator and denominator on equivalent terms was available to compare.
Commentary
For families, entry to an elite university is one selection gate, not the end of selection. The next system is often less transparent.
Hassan Akram, Founder and Principal Advisor, Elite Careers Strategy
The first sentence is interpretation and carries no evidential claim. The second is supported only within the named employer-review scope set out above and in the methodology.
Method, evidence and citation
Suggested citation
Machine assistance. Source retrieval, arithmetic, reconciliation checks and drafting for this page were carried out with AI assistance under human direction. Every figure is traceable to a named official source with a URL, locator and access date, and every calculation is published. Editorial responsibility rests with Elite Careers Strategy.
Commercial interest. Elite Careers Strategy is a paid advisory firm working in the field this research examines. The research uses public institutional sources only and contains no client evidence, but the commercial interest is disclosed rather than left to be inferred.