Schools

This RI College Is Among The 8th Hardest To Get Into In The U.S.

Rhode Island has two colleges on the 2025 Hardest Colleges To Get Into list from Niche, whose rankings focus on education and the best place

Providence's Brown University is the 8th hardest college to get into in the United States, according to recent Niche rankings.
Providence's Brown University is the 8th hardest college to get into in the United States, according to recent Niche rankings. (Mary Serreze/Patch)

RHODE ISLAND — The hardest Rhode Island college to get into is Brown University, according to a recent ranking that looks at admission rates and other factors to determine exclusivity. It is also the 8th hardest college to get into in the United States.

Rhode Island has two colleges on 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:

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  • Brown University, Providence — 5 percent acceptance rate
  • Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, 17 percent acceptance rate.

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

Nationally, the hardest schools to get into are:

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  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.

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