Public Data About UVA Admission

I got a call today from a parent who wanted to see if we would consider their student for two colleges within the University because they were applying to the School of Architecture. The parent's thinking was that the A-school is small and must be much harder to get into than UVA's College of Arts and Sciences. I assured them that wasn't necessary. They were skeptical, so I read the data off our website. I thought I'd share that information here. 

Below, I'm pasting in admission data for the last five admission cycles at UVA. Remember that residency is also a factor in our review. You can imagine that the Virginia rates are going to be a little higher the numbers shown while the out-of-state rates are lower. Overall, the admission rate for Virginia residents was 27% last year and the rate for out-of-state students was 12%. 

All of this data is public. You can play around with the admission tables on the Institutional Research and Analytics page if you'd like to see more (don't miss the tabs at the top). I couldn't fit the full pages into my screen grabs, so head over to the charts to see yield and this same info presented in table format.

College of Arts and Sciences

School of Architecture

School of Engineering

School of Nursing

Kinesiology (housed in the School of Education and Human Development)

A Note about Third Party Sites

There are so many websites offering admission advice. Some of them have been around for years, but I want to remind you that the most reputable source for information about UVA admission is...UVA admission. 

Clicking on some of the top google returns for UVA essay advice led me to multiple websites that have our old essay prompts labeled for this year. Another suggests that one of our prompts actually means "why us?" Please be careful about using third party websites for admission advice. 

I've addressed the websites that are trying to convince students we have a "why us" prompt before. Plenty of schools use a "why us" prompt on their applications. If we wanted you to write that kind of essay, we'd ask for it. Don't use the limited space you get for your responses to talk about UVA. After all, we know UVA is awesome - we're here! What we don't know yet is how awesome you are. 

Now, let me address the larger point: We strive to be clear and helpful with our instructions and prompts. We want to get applications that fulfill our needs, which is why I constantly implore students to read the application instructions on our website before applying. If a third party tells you that we want things that aren't in our instructions, please ignore them. If someone says they got into UVA because they submitted something we didn't ask for, they are wrong. They simply made the application more cumbersome for themselves (and for us). 

If you have questions about the application instructions, please reach out to us for clarification. We have a dean on call during business hours to answer questions by phone, staff answering the general email account, and I have my weekly live q&a sessions on instagram. The UVA admission team is here to help you! When we get lots of questions about the same thing, that helps us update our instructions, too.

We're here to help!