Northeastern received a record 105,190 undergraduate applications for the Class of 2029, Chancellor and Senior Vice President for Learning Ken Henderson said in a Jan. 28 faculty senate meeting, marking the seventh consecutive year that undergraduate applications to the university have increased.
The number of applications rose by 98 from 105,092 for the 2025-26 academic year. This increase is lower than in previous years, such as from the 2024-25 to 2025-26 academic year, where the university received over 10,000 more applications.
“You can see we had a record-high number of applications. We actually believe that we will exceed that number again this year, which is kind of crazy,” Henderson said during the Jan. 28 virtual meeting.
Other key enrollment metrics presented at the meeting were a “tremendous” 47% yield rate for the fall 2025 semester, or the proportion of accepted students who choose to attend Northeastern, and a 600% growth in early decision applicants since 2015. The university’s yield rate decreased by seven percentage points this year, down from 54% for the fall 2024 semester.
“We are big for a private organization. We have over 26,000 undergraduates and over 23,000 graduate students,” Henderson said at the meeting. “So that’s a great credit to everyone on this call and all of your colleagues for building very attractive programs that differentiate in a market which is extremely competitive and increasing in competitiveness.”
Last year, Northeastern’s acceptance rate rose for the first time since fall 2020 to 5.6%, up from the previous year’s 5.2%. This number only reflects students who are admitted to the university’s Boston campus, Henderson told The Huntington News in a 2024 interview, and does not account for students admitted to the N.U.in program, NYC Scholars or other alternate admissions programs.
During the 2024 interview, Henderson said that Northeastern’s application statistics “show that the university is extraordinarily attractive to a broad swath of students, both nationally within the U.S., but increasingly internationally as well.”
“The acceptance rate really reflects that great desire for the population to want to have a Northeastern experience,” Henderson said.
