Harvard University this year received about 3,000 fewer undergraduate applications than last year, a modest drop that follows months of turbulence on the Ivy League school campus.
The prestigious Massachusetts school received 54,008 applications for the incoming freshman class, representing just over a 5 percent decline in applicants overall. Still, the university said this year marked the fourth in a row for which more than 50,000 students applied.
Harvard’s undergraduate college accepted 1,245 of those applicants, who will join the 692 students who were accepted in December in early action, reported student newspaper Harvard Crimson. In total, Harvard offered admission to 1,937 students, giving the class of 2028 an acceptance rate of 3.59 percent—the highest in four years.
William Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions and financial aid, found the numbers reassuring.
“We were, by the way, very pleased to see regular action numbers,” he said in a Thursday interview with The Crimson.
With that said, the decline at Harvard stands in contrast to rising student applications at other Ivy League institutions. Yale University, for instance, saw a pool of first-year applicants 10 percent larger than the previous year—the largest in the university’s history.
Notably, the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University saw boosts in application numbers despite also having a turbulent academic year.
The former made history this year with more than 65,000 applicants, surpassing last year’s undergraduate application milestone by 9 percent. The latter, meanwhile, said the size of its applicant pool increased by 6 percent to 60,248, marking the third-highest in its history.
The admission numbers come as observers of higher education speculated about how the turmoil surrounding Harvard might affect high school students’ interest in applying. Since last summer, Harvard has been at the center of a series of controversies, each further heightening public scrutiny of its commitment to equality and academic integrity.
Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–2 that Harvard’s undergraduate admission practices violated the Constitution by discriminating against applicants of Asian ancestry, putting an end to a 10-year legal battle that Harvard spent tens of millions of dollars to fight.
Just four months later, Harvard drew renewed criticism, including from some alumni and major donors, over its treatment of Jewish students who claimed to be victims of pervasive anti-Semitism on campus in the wake of the attack on Israel by the Hamas terrorist group. The outrage reached a peaked in the days after President Claudine Gay’s testimony at a House committee hearing, during which she failed to explicitly say whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate Harvard’s code of conduct on bullying or harassment.
Ms. Gay stepped down from her position a month following the disastrous congressional hearing, facing intense public scrutiny not only because her administration’s handling of anti-Semitism, but also accusations of plagiarism in some of her academic publications. Her tenure, just six months and two days long, is the shortest in Harvard’s history.
Ms. Gay’s departure also came amid an exodus of longtime and powerful donors. Among those who closed their checkbook were hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin, whose $300 million donation led the university to rename its graduate school of arts and sciences in his honor; and billionaire philanthropist Leonard Blavatnik, who made the largest single gift to Harvard Medical School in its history—a $200 million donation in 2018.
The university remains the subject of at least three high-profile investigations. Two were launched by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, with one probing anti-Muslim bias and the other looking into complaints about anti-Semitism.
The House Education and Workforce Committee, chaired by Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), is leading a separate anti-Semitism investigation into Harvard’s alleged failure to “provide Jewish students the safe learning environment.” The investigation has since been expanded to cover several other prestigious colleges, including Columbia, UPenn, the University of California at Berkeley, Rutgers University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
