With its rapidly rising application numbers and rapidly dropping acceptance rate, New York University (NYU) is starting to live up to the classic lyric from the Frank Sinatra standard, “New York, New York:” “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.”
NYU’s notable application growth from first year applicants has led to the private New York City-based university receiving a startling 98,000 Regular Decision applications during the 2022-2023 admissions cycle. All in all, NYU received nearly 120,000 applications for its Class of 2027, which represents an increase of 13% from last year. In fact, NYU saw increases across all of its campuses and all of its schools in New York. NYU also has major campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai.
The increased number of applications, combined with consistently growing yield rates over the past few years, has made for an incredibly competitive admission cycle that will lead to an overall acceptance rate “a number of percentage points lower than last year” according to Jonathan B. Williams, NYU’s Associate Vice President for Undergraduate Admissions.
Last year, (the 2021-2022 admissions cycle), NYU received 105,000 first year applications and had an overall acceptance rate of 12.2%. This means once it’s finalized, NYU’s overall acceptance rate will now be in or quite close to the single digits. As recently as the 2016-2017 admissions cycle, NYU was accepting over 20% of all applicants; that cycle NYU only received 67,000 applications.
Regular Decision applicants will receive one of several different decisions on Tuesday, March 28, 2023 depending on the options selected on their applications:
Admitted Students
In the vast majority of cases, students who are admitted receive an offer of admission to their first-choice campus and school. Students not admitted to their first choice are then considered for admission to an alternate choice school or campus. Students will receive only one decision from NYU, and no students are admitted to any campus, program, or major that they did not explicitly indicate interest in on their application.
Waitlisted Students
With such an incredibly competitive applicant pool, NYU’s Undergraduate Admissions team needed to make difficult decisions about students who presented very competitive applications. Students offered a place on NYU’s waitlist will be required to confirm that they wish to continue to be considered for admission should space become available. Typically, NYU does not review its waitlist until after May 1.
Waitlisted students may be admitted to begin in Fall 2023 or admitted to programs with Spring 2024 start options, specifically: Liberal Studies Core and select majors within the School of Professional Studies, Tandon School of Engineering, and the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.
According to Williams, NYU’s waitlist comprises less than 15% of its applicant pool, and it is not ranked. Waitlisted applicants should not send any additional information beyond what is requested on the waitlist response form.
Denied Students
While rejection is hard, at least it may be a bit easier knowing that nine out of ten NYU applicants are meeting the same fate. Hopefully such applicants had some safety options on their college lists.