Harvard Accepts 3.59% of Applicants to Class of 2028

Harvard College accepted 3.59 percent of applicants to its Class of 2028 — the highest acceptance rate in four years — in the first admissions cycle since the fall of affirmative action prohibited the College from considering race during the process.

Harvard offered admission to 1,245 applicants at 7 p.m. on Thursday, all of whom join the 692 students who were accepted in the early admission cycle this December. In total, Harvard offered admission to 1,937 students to join the Class of 2028.

“We think they’re the greatest,” Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 said of the admitted class in a Thursday interview. “We really want to see them come here.”

Harvard received a total of 54,008 applications, a 5.14 percent decrease from last year even as it marked the fourth year in a row that it received more than 50,000 applications.

Thursday’s announcement also contained one notable omission: race and ethnicity data for the incoming class. The College did not release the statistics when it announced its early admission results in December, and intends to withhold the data until admitted students accept or decline their offers later this summer.

The College is still in the midst of processing transfer applications, and waitlist decisions will be released once admitted students accept or decline their offers.

Tuition continued to rise this year, climbing to $82,866 for students who do not receive financial aid — a 4.3 percent increase from last year’s tuition of $79,450.

But even as tuition continued to climb, Harvard did not increase its threshold for receiving full financial aid. The decision is a break from the past two years when the College steadily increased the threshold for full financial aid by $10,000.

Like last year, the cost to attend Harvard will be free for students with annual family incomes below $85,000. By maintaining its financial aid threshold at 2023 levels, the College will likely face questions about whether the recent donor backlash to the University contributed to that decision.

This year, Pell Grant eligible students make up 20.7 percent of the class, an increase from 19 percent last year. More than 20 percent of accepted students are the first in their family to attend college.

Despite delays in the release of federal student aid data after recent miscalculations by the U.S. Department of Education, Fitzsimmons dismissed concerns that students’ financial aid packages will be delayed.

“Anybody who sent in material, they will have an award tonight,” Fitzsimmons said.

For the seventh consecutive year, women make up a slight majority — 53.1 percent — of Harvard’s admitted class.

The Class of 2028 also comes from all 50 states and every region of the United States: 20.1 percent of admitted students hail from the mid-Atlantic, while 18.5 percent come from the Western and Mountain states, 16.6 percent from New England, 16.2 percent from the South, 11.4 percent from the Midwest, and 0.4 percent from external U.S. territories, including Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

In addition, the Class of 2028 accepted 254 applicants from Massachusetts, the most of any state, followed by California, New York, and New Jersey.

“We think it’s very important for us to do our part in educating future leaders of Cambridge, Boston, of the state of Massachusetts,” Fitzsimmons said. “We take that very, very seriously.”

Harvard also joined the Small Town Outreach, Recruitment, and Yield consortium — a group of universities aiming to recruit applicants in rural communities — following the Supreme Court’s ruling in June.

The Class of 2028 is also “unusually international,” Fitzsimmons said. More than 15 percent of accepted applicants are international students, hailing from 94 countries. Canada, the United Kingdom, and China are the top three most represented countries.

The College also offered 21 veterans admission, while a total of 41 students expressed interest in the Reserve Officers Training Corps — a training program that prepares for service in the military.

This is the fourth class admitted under test-optional policies, where applicants can choose not to submit standardized test scores. While multiple other colleges and universities, including Dartmouth, Yale, and Brown, have returned to requiring testing, Harvard will remain test-optional through the Class of 2030.

In the interview on Thursday, Fitzsimmons maintained that the office has “nothing new to report” as to when they will announce the College’s future plans.

The Class of 2028 will be invited to campus from April 14-15 for Visitas, the two-day annual program for admits.

Students have until May 1 to accept or deny their offer of admission to join the Class of 2028.

—Staff writer Elyse C. Goncalves can be reached at elyse.goncalves@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @e1ysegoncalves or on Threads @elyse.goncalves.

—Staff writer Matan H. Josephy can be reached matan.josephy@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @matanjosephy.