“Our College System Would Go to Hell Very Quickly”: America’s Two College Admissions Markets

Junjie Guo and Ananth Seshadri

Executive Summary

Public discussion of college admissions has focused heavily on a small group of unusually selective universities. Harvard is the most visible example. These institutions have far more qualified applicants than seats, can turn away strong students and still fill their classes.

88 percent of four-year colleges in the U.S. have open admissions or admit at least half of their applicants. Only 31 institutions, 1.4 percent of the total, admit fewer than one applicant in ten.

Even major research universities sit far apart on the undergraduate admissions distribution. In fall 2023, Harvard admitted 3.5 percent of applicants, UW–Madison 43 percent, and Minnesota–Twin Cities 77 percent. Institutions at the extreme selective tail are therefore a poor guide to the admissions conditions facing most American colleges.

Parts of graduate education operate differently. International students earn 18 percent of American master’s degrees and nearly half of master’s degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. At UW–Madison, the University of California, and the University of Minnesota, their share falls from applications to admissions and again from admissions to enrollment. Selectivity does not mean that admitted students are easy to replace. The same institution can ration scarce places in one program and compete to fill another. Among 28 highly selective private research universities, first-year undergraduate enrollment rose only 2.9 percent from 2019 to 2023 while engineering and computing master’s degree production rose 49 percent.

Whether an international student displaces a domestic student depends on whether university capacity is fixed or can respond to demand. One study finds that every 100 additional Chinese master’s students led American universities to create roughly one additional master’s program. Another finds that ten additional international graduate students were associated with about eight additional domestic graduate students. These results do not rule out crowd-out; they show that capacity can respond.

International science-and-engineering master’s enrollment fell 24 percent from fall 2024 to fall 2025. Exposure is uneven: international students were 4.5 percent of graduate enrollment at the median institution and more than half at 49 institutions. At North Texas, where international students had been roughly half of graduate enrollment, international graduate enrollment fell about 45 percent and total graduate enrollment about 22 percent. Institutions with deep applicant pools have more ways to replace students who do not come. If the replacement would otherwise have enrolled elsewhere, however, the university can protect its own enrollment without restoring the missing student for the system as a whole

Harvard’s admissions problem is the allocation of a small number of highly contested seats. Many colleges and programs instead face the problem of sustaining enrollment when admitted students have attractive alternatives. Treating those settings as equivalent can misstate both who is displaced when demand rises and where the losses fall when demand declines.