These MD Colleges Among Hardest To Get Into: See List

MARYLAND — The hardest Maryland college to get into is Johns Hopkins University, according to a recent ranking that looks at admission rates to determine exclusivity.

Maryland has two colleges in the top 30 of the 2025 Hardest Colleges To Get Into list from Niche, whose rankings focus on education and the best places to live.

Those schools and their acceptance rates are:

• 19. Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (7 percent)
• 30. United States Naval Academy, Annapolis (11 percent)

Niche only assigned numerical rankings to the 96 most exclusive schools in the country, but it named 237 schools to its list of the most selective colleges.

These Maryland schools fell outside the ranked 96, but they were still listed in the top 237.

• University of Maryland, College Park (45 percent)
• Coppin State University, Baltimore (45 percent)
• St. John's College, Annapolis (50 percent)

Niche said ACT and SAT scores were removed from this year’s rankings “to reflect a general de-emphasis on test scores in the college admissions process.”

Related:

• This MD College Among The ‘New Ivies’ Employers Prefer, Forbes
• Hardest U.S. College To Get Into Is Not An Exclusive Ivy League School

Nationally, the hardest schools to get into are:

1. Minerva University, San Francisco (1 percent)
2. California Institute of Technology, Pasadena (3 percent),
3. Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (3 percent)
4. Stanford University, Stanford, California (4 percent)
5. Columbia University, New York City (4 percent)
6. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (4 percent)
7. Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (5 percent)
8. Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island (5 percent)
9. University of Chicago (5 percent)
10. Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey (6 percent)
11. Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (6 percent)
12. Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire (6 percent)
13. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (7 percent)
14. Vanderbilt University, Nashville (7 percent)
15. Northeastern University, Boston (7 percent)
16. Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania (7 percent)
17. Pomona College, Claremont, California (7 percent)
18. Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois (7 percent)
19. Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (7 percent)
20. Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts (7 percent)

Three of those schools — Johns Hopkins University, Northwestern University and Vanderbilt University — are what Forbes calls “the New Ivies,” 20 public and private schools that offer good job prospects to graduates as employers turn away from the nation’s oldest and most venerable schools.

• Related: Forbes Names 20 Colleges ‘New Ivies,’ Says Employers Prefer Them