SAT Score Needed To Get Into California’s Most Selective College

PALO ALTO, CA -- Still, yet another reason California can boast superiority.

The most selective college in the Golden State is the California Institute of Technology, according to a new report, which says that to get admitted, you’d probably need an SAT score of between 1530 and 1590. That's the highest score of the 50 states.

The financial news and opinion site 24/7 Wall Street showed wide disparities depending on where applicants live.

And for Pasadena's top notch school, it will cost you $24, 466 a year.

Cal Tech, as it is referred to, for example, admits 7.7 percent of students. But that number ranges from as low as 5.2 percent — Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts — all the way to 96.8 percent at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Meanwhile, the median among the 50 most selective colleges was about 29 percent. The Northeast has some of the most selective of the colleges that are hardest to get into, claiming four of the five lowest admission rates, according to the study, published Wednesday.

1. Massachusetts — 5.2 percent (Harvard University)
2. New Jersey — 6.4 percent (Princeton University)
3. New York — 6.6 percent (Columbia University)
4. Connecticut — 6.9 percent (Yale University)
5. California — 7.7 percent (California Institute of Technology)
6. Rhode Island — 8.5 percent (Brown University)
7. Illinois — 8.7 percent (University of Chicago)
8. Pennsylvania — 9.3 percent (University of Pennsylvania)
9. North Carolina — 9.9 percent (Duke University)
10. New Hampshire — 10.4 percent (Dartmouth College)

The list includes states with large, elite universities that receive tens of thousands of applications every year, but it also includes small — and often expensive — private institutions.

The authors noted that acceptance rates are often considered an “approximation for exclusivity.” Generally, schools with lower acceptance rates will be able to provide higher qualities of education and a more “prestigious” degree.

The authors determined the most selective colleges by reviewing education data for thousands of four-year, degree-granting institutions from the National Center for Education Statistics and other sources. The acceptance rates, SAT and ACT scores of admitted students were then indexed to see how difficult it is to get into a university.

Patch national staffer Dan Hampton contributed to this report.

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