In recent years, Northeastern’s acceptance rate has plummeted to a mere 5.2% in the 2024 admissions cycle — a number rivaling Ivy League universities.

However, the university’s prestige didn’t always look like this. Northeastern was originally an evening college and then a commuter school, lacking resources and modern facilities. The co-op program allowed students to develop their practical skills and earn money to fund their education. According to documents in Northeastern’s archives, without the money earned from their co-op work, the majority of students would not have been able to attend the university.

Now, Northeastern attracts students globally to Boston and its 12 other campuses. In May 2024, Northeastern announced a merger with Marymount Manhattan College in New York City, marking its 14th campus. 

Since fall 2020, the number of applicants to the university is up 52.6%. Moreover, the yield rate — the number of students who are admitted and choose to attend that school — increased from 23.7% in 2020 to 50.3% in 2023. Yield rates are a key statistic for admissions departments, as the figure represents interest in an institution beyond filling out an application. 

Looking back further, Northeastern’s acceptance rate sat around 37.9% in 2010; in 2001, it was 70.3%, and the university received 14,760 applications. Now, the number of applicants has increased by over 550%.

Rachel Blankstein, co-founder of Spark Admissions — a college admissions consulting firm — said that “[Northeastern’s] reputation is stronger than its ranking.”

“It’s definitely inconsistent,” she said, referring to the Ivy League schools with higher acceptance rates than Northeastern. For instance, Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania reported an acceptance rate of 8.41% and 5.4% for its class of 2028, respectively. 

Kate Nation, a first-year architecture major, said Northeastern’s selectivity was a concern when applying. She said Northeastern was undoubtedly her top choice among the other reputable schools in the area. 

“The acceptance rate was definitely more of a scare,” she said. “It definitely made me think about other schools to apply to just to be safe.”

Despite a national decline in college and university enrollment since 2010, and institutional acceptance rates on average going up, Northeastern’s admission statistics have steadily become more competitive. In a January 2024 interview with The Huntington News, Chancellor and Senior Vice President for Learning Ken Henderson said that universities are required to report to the government how many students are admitted for the fall semester, meaning spring entrants are excluded from the acceptance rate.

But Northeastern had humble beginnings. The Young Men’s Christian Association of Greater Boston, or YMCA, was established in 1851. In 1898, the Evening Institute of the Boston YMCA was founded, which later became Northeastern University, offering night classes to working men, most of whom were looking to learn new trades, in fields such as technology, engineering and finance.

In 1935, Northeastern gained the ability to grant degrees, and in 1948 the university was separated from the Boston YMCA. From there, enrollment rose significantly, and by 1975, with 35,218 students, Northeastern was the nation’s largest private university and ranked 25th in enrollment nationally, according to The New York Times. 

Despite this growth, the university faced a nearly fatal budget gap in the 1990s, inspiring then-President John A. Curry to model the school after Boston College and Boston University, which were both smaller, more selective schools at the time. 

Ralph Perrella, who graduated from Northeastern in 1996, said he hit a “demographic lottery” as an out-of-state student with a high SAT score. As a prospective student in fall 1990, he said he was interested in both Boston University and Boston College, but ultimately chose Northeastern when he received the Carl S. Ell Presidential Scholarship in January 1991. 

“It was less than 100 years old when I got there,” he said. “It was very much the ‘other school’ in Boston. Good for them for punching up to a higher weight class.”

The year Perrella graduated, Richard M. Freeland became president of Northeastern, serving from 1996 through 2006. 

In an August 2024 interview with The Boston Globe, Freeland said his team examined how to improve Northeastern’s spot on the U.S. News & World Report College Rankings — an annual ranking of colleges and universities started in 1983. Freeland told The Globe that the rankings “gave us a playing field on which to compete.” 

Since U.S. News began ranking colleges and universities more than 40 years ago, the list has provided many institutions with prestige they didn’t previously have. 

Northeastern breached the top 150 in fall 2002 when it reached 142. The university climbed to the 115th spot in fall 2005, and after Freeland’s final year as president, Northeastern finally broke the top 100, ranking at 98th in 2006. That same year, the university’s acceptance rate fell below 45%, a 36.3% decrease from 2001. Historically, the rankings prefer large public universities over private universities, Blankstein said.

“U.S. News and World Report set the rules and Northeastern built their plan about putting themselves in the best light as it relates specifically to those rules as it relates specifically to moving up the rankings,” Perrella said. “I think it was a savvy thing to do.”

With the success of his predecessors, the stage was set for President Joseph E. Aoun when he assumed the university’s presidency in 2006.

While rankings were based on academic reputation in 1983, there are now 17 factors that inform a ranking, including graduation rates, standardized tests and student-faculty ratio. 

From 2022-23, Northeastern’s rank slipped from 44 to 53 — a shift from Northeastern’s steady incline — following changes in the U.S. News’ methodology. The new methodology factored in first-generation graduation rate, borrower debt, a school’s average federal loan debt among borrowers and graduation rate performance. 

“My degree looks a lot better now than it did in 1996,” Perrella said. 

On the 2025 list, Northeastern placed at 54, lower than its all-time best in 2017 when it was 39 in a tie along with Boston University and three other schools.

“For the past 19 years, Northeastern’s leadership has been laser focused on elevating the university across all dimensions of its teaching and research mission,” Renata Nyul, Northeastern’s vice president for communications, wrote in a statement to The News. “Ultimately, rankings are only a byproduct of an institution’s real successes, including faculty achievements, research impact, enrollment metrics, student achievements, and globalization of the campus network. Northeastern’s unparalleled leadership in experiential learning, powered by our renowned co-op program, has been a remarkable value proposition for students and families.”

Northeastern’s global campus presence, driven by its N.U.in program, has been a distinguishing factor for the university. N.U.in, which began in fall 2007, sends students to study abroad for their first semester before they move to the Boston campus in the spring. In response to an article published by The Boston Globe in 2019, Nyul wrote in the university-run media outlet Northeastern Global News that the university developed N.U.in as a way to “stagger enrollment and meet the overwhelming demand for a Northeastern education.”

Moreover, in response to whether admitting international students who do not have to submit SAT or ACT scores as a strategy to increase Northeastern’s rank, Nyul wrote that Northeastern began adding international students circa 2007 “as a way to prepare all of its students — domestic and international — for the globalized world they will work and live in after graduation.” 

“This is a pedagogical priority, and there is no evidence that international students in any way underperform in comparison to American students,” Nyul wrote.   

From fall 2008 to through fall 2020, Northeastern was test-optional for applicants who applied from a high school located outside of the United States. Starting the 2021-22 academic year, the test-optional policies were extended to all applicants. Until COVID-19, most higher education institutions required applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores, but had varying policies for international students. 

In 2022, 21,385 international students were enrolled at Northeastern, and it is consistently recognized as a university with one of the highest international student populations. For the fall 2024 admissions cycle, Northeastern received “record interest” from countries like China, India, South Korea, Brazil and Taiwan, according to Northeastern Global News. 

Northeastern also doesn’t require a supplemental essay, which can boost applications as students are not deterred by an additional application submission. But to Arav Shah, a first-year business administration major, the acceptance rate reflects the “rigorous application cycle.” 

“I don’t think it really affected my decision to apply here, but I guess I was more anxious to see, you know, I’m competing against a lot of intelligent people,” he said. 

Blankstein attributes Northeastern’s competitiveness to the fact that potential students and families “care dramatically” about college rankings, in addition to Northeastern’s co-op program that delivers a return on investment parents are looking for. 

Northeastern has crept its way to the big leagues through an effort spanning generations.

“From a marketing standpoint, there is no question that [Northeastern] wrote the book on how to really market itself really well while climbing in the rankings and concurrently decreasing its admission rate,” Blankstein said.