The traditional May 1 decision deadline has come and gone, but it’s not too late to find a college match—here are dozens of excellent schools still seeking students for the upcoming fall semester.
It’s been getting worse every year. For a variety of reasons, elite college admissions are becoming an impossible dream—even for perfect students. Today, 19 of 20 applications submitted to nearly all of the schools in the Ivy League are rejected. But the super elite aren’t alone. Consider Northeastern University, a popular Boston-based school with 16,000 undergraduates. Until the 1990s it was largely considered a commuter college. Over the last ten years its admissions rate has plunged from 32% to 5.2% in 2024, for its Class of 2028. The same holds for nearby Boston University—its acceptance rate has fallen to 10.8% down from nearly 60% a decade ago. Ditto for New York University, which announced it accepted only 7.7% of more than 120,000 applications that came in for its undergraduate class of 2029. A decade ago it accepted 35% of its applicants. Tulane University, another hot school, had an admission rate of more than 60% in the early 2000s. Last year it was 8.5%.
Lower admissions rates lead to more stress and more heartbreak. As of March 1, 1.4 million students submitted more than 8.5 million college applications via the Common App—a 4% annual increase in the number of applicants and a 6% increase over last year’s application volume. TikTok and Reddit are full of posts from crestfallen students who were denied by their dream schools and others that were rejected by every college they applied to. Some have taken to posting videos celebrating their misses with “rejection cakes.”
The traditional May 1 decision deadline has come and gone, but it’s not too late to secure a college acceptance for the fall term. Through May and even June, hundreds of colleges report to the National Association for College Admission Counselors that they still have seats available in their incoming freshman classes. As of Wednesday, 281 colleges told NACAC they’re still seeking applicants. Many of these colleges are excellent and in an effort to highlight the best colleges in need of freshmen, Forbes has culled the list for schools that appear on the 2025 Forbes Top Colleges list, as well as the Princeton Review’s 2025 list of Best Colleges.
If you had your heart set on Maine’s Colby College (7% acceptance rate) or Vermont’s Middlebury College (7.25% acceptance rate) you might instead consider Skidmore College, a small liberal arts school of 2,700 undergraduates located on the outskirts of charming Saratoga Springs, New York, known for its thoroughbred horse racing track and performing arts center. The college has about 40 majors ranging from its popular Management and Business to Computer Science, Music and Environmental Studies. It also has a world class equine center with 65 stalls and offers multiple horse riding electives.
Campus of University of San Francisco
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Another excellent option is the University of San Francisco, a private Jesuit university that is popular for health professions programs, including a public health major and a dual-degree, five-year clinical nurse leader program. The university, situated between the Anza Vista and famous Haight-Ashbury neighborhoods, enrolls about 9,000 students and awards 97% of them some form of financial aid. Proximity to San Francisco’s rich tech and startup industries yields plentiful opportunities for internships and networking. And if internships are a goal, Philadelphia’s Drexel University, with 12,000 undergraduates and 100 majors and minors, is known for its co-op program which places students in paying jobs for six-month stints at employers like Comcast, Dupont, Estée Lauder, Vanguard and Johnson & Johnson during their four or five year programs. Drexel hasn’t filled up its Class of 2029 and is also seeking freshmen.
Among public institutions, The College of New Jersey, known as TCNJ, is widely regarded as the Garden State’s top choice for high achieving students looking for lower tuition than private colleges and a smaller campus environment than giant flagship schools like Rutgers. With picturesque Georgian Colonial revival architecture and 7,000 undergrads, the school, which is 20 minutes from Princeton, has 50 majors, including Business, Education, Engineering, Psychology, Nursing and Exercise Science.
If a large public university is more your speed, consider the University of Kentucky, which enrolls nearly 24,000 undergraduates at its campus in Lexington. Popular programs at the land-grant university include nursing, finance and mechanical engineering. The division one Wildcats’ men’s basketball team have regularly made it to the Sweet Sixteen, and the women’s volleyball team won the university’s most recent national championship title in 2021. For the sun seeker, consider the University of San Diego. The private Catholic research university enrolls nearly 10,000 students, and is located just six miles from the beach. For a smaller sun soaked college, look at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida, about a half hour from Daytona Beach and an hour from Disney World. The university enrolls about 3,700 students—two thirds of which are undergraduates—and popular programs include business management, health sciences and digital arts.
Students who want to apply to these schools should get their applicants in as soon as possible, says Natalia Ostrowski, an admissions consultant with InGenius Prep and former admissions officer for the University of Chicago. “Once the summer hits it will be harder to get in touch with your college counselors, who submit official transcripts and a recommendation, and teachers, who submit recommendations,” she says.
Starting this fall, colleges, especially small liberal arts schools in the Northeast and Midwest, are beginning to feel the squeeze of enrollment declines—a long-delayed effect of the decline in birth rates during the 2008 recession. Most colleges rely on headcounts—and the tuition dollars they bring—to make up most of their operating revenues. As the number of college-age American students dwindles, it’s likely that NACAC’s list of college openings will grow in the coming years.
Another factor contributing to future shortfalls in enrollment could be the Trump Administration’s attack on American higher education by slashing research funding, curbing international student enrollment with erratic visa policies and shuttering DEI programs. This will likely spur a drop in foreign student enrollment as well as drive a growing number of American students to look abroad for university. Applications from U.S. undergraduates to colleges in the United Kingdom increased by 12% this spring, surpassing the 2021-22 record and doubling demand in 2017, according to data from the University and College Admissions Service. Thirty four of the NACAC schools are outside the U.S., and 21 of them, listed below, also appear on Times Higher Ed’s World University Rankings, which evaluates colleges in 18 areas like teaching and research, and the U.S. News and World Report’s global university rankings.
The price tag on foreign colleges is often much cheaper—on average, tuition at private schools in the United Kingdom costs between $13,000 and $50,000 per year, compared with American private colleges, many of which set their sticker prices at $60,000 or more. Moreover, most bachelor’s degree programs in the U.K. and in Europe take three years to complete, as opposed to the United States’ typical four years.
The University of Galway in western Ireland is among those still seeking applicants for the fall. The public research university enrolls about 20,000 students, and specializes in medicine, law and marine science programs. So too is the University of Dublin, Ireland’s largest university, where many students study food and agriculture science. In London, creative students would be wise to check out Goldsmiths, which offers a three-year bachelor’s degree, a traditional campus and majors ranging from “anthropology, media and digital practice,” to politics, philosophy and economics, art curating, drama and digital design. Another U.K. standout is 612-year-old University of St. Andrews, which is still accepting students. Fifty two miles outside of Edinburgh, St. Andrews sits near the beach off the North Sea, and it’s known for its foreign affairs programs. The university has all of the trappings of a historic British college—Hogwarts-esque buildings and dozens of black-tie student balls.
University of St. Andrews
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If you can tolerate—or prefer—the cold, Canada’s University of New Brunswick, north of Maine, is also on the list. It has two primary campuses in Fredericton and Saint John, about an hour’s drive apart, and is known for its geoscience and electrical engineering programs. The more prestigious University of Alberta in Edmonton is another option. Edmonton is Canada’s oil and gas capital, known as the Texas of the North. It also has an artsy side, hosting an annual International Fringe Theatre Festival that draws more than 100,000 ticket buyers with 1400 performances. The university offers around 200 majors and is a great school for those interested in mining, earth science and agriculture.
Students unhappy with their current acceptances should research these colleges and enroll for the fall, rather than delay their college start date and re-apply for the following year, says Nick Strohl, also a counselor with InGenius Prep and a former admissions officer for Yale University. “If their ultimate goal is to attend a certain school that is not among their current options, the best thing they can do is apply themselves to their studies next year, demonstrate their ability to succeed and thrive in college, and apply as a transfer student in the future,” he says. A strong transfer applicant has a much better shot at admission than a high school graduate who took a gap year.
“In my experience reading transfer applications at Yale, [admissions officers] at top schools do not care where a student is currently going to school—that is, a student attending a selective school does not have an advantage over a student attending a community college,” says Strohl. “In fact, the student attending a community college may have a more compelling case for transfer because they are coming from a less common context.”