December is an anxious time of year for many high school seniors as they scramble to finish college applications and wait to learn where they are admitted.
But there’s some good news for many families: U.S. colleges are accepting a higher proportion of students in recent years.
The median admissions rate at four-year colleges and universities increased by more than 7 percentage points between 2012 and 2022, according to a new analysis from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
One reason why colleges are accepting more students is because fewer high school graduates are going to college. In Indiana, the college-going rate was about 53% for the class of 2022 — a 13 percentage point decline from a decade earlier.
Those declines mean there are fewer teens vying for spots at colleges across the U.S.
Most of Indiana’s four-year public and private colleges with selective admission accepted more students in 2022 than a decade earlier.
That includes competitive schools like Indiana University in Bloomington and Butler University, which both admit about 80% of applicants.
But there are exceptions. Purdue University in West Lafayette — which admits about 50% of students — and the University of Notre Dame — which admits about 13% — both admitted fewer students in 2022 than they did 10 years before.
Nationally, nearly 90% of four-year colleges and universities either admit the majority of applicants or do not have selective admissions.
This article was written by WFYI education reporter Dylan Peers McCoy.
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