These VA Colleges Are The Hardest To Get Into: See List

VIRGINIA — The hardest Virginia college to get into is Washington and Lee University, according to a recent ranking that looks at admission rates and other factors to determine exclusivity.

No Virginia colleges were in the top 50 of the 2025 Hardest Colleges To Get Into list from Niche, whose rankings focus on education and the best places to live. However, Niche put together a Virginia-specific list of the schools with the strictest admissions.

Those schools and their acceptance rates are:

• Washington and Lee University, Lexington, 17 percent acceptance rate
• University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 19 percent acceptance rate
• University of Richmond, Richmond, 24 percent acceptance rate
• Regent University, Virginia Beach, 32 percent acceptance rate
• William & Mary, Williamsburg, 33 percent acceptance rate
• Hampden-Sydney College, Hampden Sydney, 40 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.”

• Related: 2 VA Colleges Among The ‘New Ivies’ Employers Prefer: Forbes

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.