Undergraduate admissions data in the US
Data on acceptance rates for architecture schools across the US.
Updated May 2026
If you are applying to architecture school and you have a spare 30 minutes to review the following page, stop, spend 5 minutes reviewing this page and the other 25 minutes making visual work for your portfolios. The bottom line is that many architecture schools are very competitive at admissions, and reviewing these figures in detail will only detract from your creative development, which should be a higher priority. Creative development incidentally allows applicants to overcome low acceptance rates. It’s the only way to overcome low acceptance rates.
General US undergraduate admissions data is collected with greater care than in most other countries. This allows us to show the following data, which comes from IPEDS. Other countries do not share their data so uniformly, which is why only the US has been shown.
At the schools AP students most commonly apply to, acceptance rates vary enormously, ranging from Cooper Union’s published 4% for its School of Architecture to SCI-Arc’s 77%, and the figure that matters most is rarely the one that appears in a Google search.
The problem is that IPEDS, the federal database that underpins most publicly available US college admissions data, reports acceptance rates at the institution level. A prospective B.Arch applicant searching for Cornell’s acceptance rate finds 9%, the university-wide figure. But Cornell AAP applicants are not competing against the university’s full applicant pool. They are competing for a small number of studio places within one of the Ivy League’s most selective individual colleges. The relevant figure is closer to 8%, which in Cornell’s case is broadly similar, but at other institutions the gap is far larger.
At Virginia Tech, the university-wide acceptance rate is around 55%. The School of Architecture, however, is consistently ranked among the top five public architecture programs in the country and draws a national applicant pool to a program with limited seats. The architecture-specific rate is substantially lower; we estimate around 15%. The same dynamic applies at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where architecture is among the most impacted majors at a university that admits broadly, producing an estimated program-level rate of around 9%.
At the most selective standalone schools, the rates are more legible. Cooper Union publishes school-level data directly, confirming an architecture acceptance rate of 4% for Fall 2025, lower than art (8%) and engineering (16%) within the same institution. RISD’s architecture program, similarly self-contained, is the most demanded department at a school with an overall acceptance rate of around 21%, making the effective architecture rate considerably lower. We estimate around 14%.
For universities where architecture is one program among many, we apply a researched multiplier to the IPEDS university-wide rate. The multiplier is informed by two factors: how much the program’s national reputation exceeds the institution’s overall profile (the prestige gap), and whether the university is already highly selective, in which case architecture rates tend to track closely to the institutional average. Cooper Union’s published data anchors the model: a standalone school where architecture runs at 0.29x the overall rate provides a real-world reference point for how compressed architecture-specific acceptance rates can be relative to headline figures.
The table below shows estimated architecture acceptance rates, university-wide IPEDS rates, and SAT/ACT score ranges for 20 US B.Arch programs. Estimated rates are modelled figures, not reported data. Where schools publish program-level rates directly, those figures are used.
| School | Est. arch. rate | Overall rate (IPEDS) | SAT middle 50% | ACT middle 50% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cooper Union | ~4% | 13.9% | 1430–1540 | 33–34 |
| Rice University | ~7% | 7.7% | 1160–1340 | 23–29 |
| University of Southern California | ~8% | 9.3% | 1250–1510 | 27–33 |
| Cornell University | ~8% | 8.8% | 1500–1570 | 33–35 |
| Cal Poly San Luis Obispo | ~9% | 31.3% | N/A | N/A |
| Carnegie Mellon University | ~11% | 11.7% | 1500–1570 | 34–35 |
| Auburn University | ~12% | 45.9% | 1260–1390 | 26–31 |
| Tulane University | ~12% | 14.0% | 1400–1520 | 31–34 |
| RISD | ~14% | 21.4% | 1375–1510 | 30–34 |
| Clemson University | ~15% | 38.3% | 1240–1410 | 28–32 |
| Virginia Tech | ~15% | 54.8% | 1280–1450 | 28–32 |
| University of Oregon | ~18% | 88.3% | 1130–1360 | 23–30 |
| University of Texas at Austin | ~20% | 57.4% | 1150–1400 | 25–31 |
| Penn State University | ~21% | 60.6% | 1240–1420 | 27–32 |
| Pratt Institute | ~22% | 63.5% | 1375–1510 | 30–34 |
| Cal Poly Pomona | ~22% | 74.4% | 1160–1370 | 24–29 |
| Syracuse University | ~23% | 45.9% | 1270–1440 | 29–32 |
| Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute | ~45% | 81.0% | 1190–1420 | 24–32 |
| Drexel University | ~55% | 79.0% | N/A | N/A |
| SCI-Arc | ~77% | 76.6% | N/A | N/A |
Est. arch. rate = university-wide IPEDS rate multiplied by an estimated factor (using AP insights) reflecting each program’s selectivity relative to its institution. Cooper Union’s architecture rate (4%) is published directly by the school (Fall 2025) and anchors the model. SCI-Arc rate is taken directly from IPEDS 2024 as a standalone school. All other architecture-specific rates are estimates, not reported data. SAT/ACT ranges are middle 50% for enrolled first-years who submitted scores.