Congratulations to the Dunbar Class of 2025!

Looking Back on the 2025 Admissions Season

Last week, the Dunbar Consultants team sat down to review our students’ application results and reflect on this year’s admissions season.

Here are our findings:

1.     Smart early application strategies are critical, continuing a trend we have seen for several years now as colleges fill significant portions of their incoming classes with Early Decision students. Most of our students’ greatest successes came from early application commitments. In short, how a student applies is equally important as their academic profile.

2.     More than ever, institutional priorities drive admissions decisions, including seeking recruited athletes, international, first generation, and under-resourced students.

3.     Legacy relationships create less leverage in admissions than they used to; five states now specifically ban the use of legacy in reviewing applications at either public or all institutions (CA, CO, IL, MD, VA).

4.     There is continued growing interest in undergraduate business and STEM programs, which is consistent with national trends. We advise families that business programs are more selective than most arts and sciences programs; engineering is even more selective, and computer science is the most selective. For these programs, we see a growing emphasis on a student’s fit to major at colleges that accept by area of study – in other words, prospective business or engineering students should find a way to specifically engage in those fields to demonstrate their interest.

5.     Another national trend that we are seeing among our students is a shift in focus to Southeastern state universities with a wide range of academic opportunities, warm weather, and big school spirit.

6.     While we didn’t necessarily see more waitlist decisions this year than has become the norm, we have seen an increase in students being accepted off waitlists at colleges including Columbia, Georgetown, the University of Michigan, and NYU. We believe these acceptances are being driven by the reluctance of some international families to send their students to the U.S. for college in the current political climate. Furthermore, we anticipate waitlist activity to continue into the summer months and will be watching this trend closely in this upcoming application season. (Waitlisted students should continue to monitor their email!)

7.     Only 11% of our students’ deferred applications were ultimately accepted – a finding which confirms our advice to move on from a deferral and seek an Early Decision 2 option, if possible.

It’s validating to see that our assessments continue to be on target – 95% of our students’ Likely applications were accepted, 62% of Possible applications, and 25% of Reach applications. (We define those categories as greater than 75% chance of acceptance, 50% chance of acceptance, and less than 25% chance of acceptance, respectively.)

Thank you to all the families of our seniors who entrusted us to work with their students – we are incredibly proud of all of them! — and we look forward to working with our juniors as they ramp up to put together their own applications!

Have a wonderful summer!

SEE OUR COMPLETE CLASS OF 2025 ACCEPTANCE LIST