Each year, the Common Application processes more than ten million submissions from a million and a half students. NACAC surveys the deans who read them. Together, the two sources draw the most complete public picture of who applies to college, what colleges weigh, and what they refuse to publish.
In 2013-14, the Common App handled fewer than five million applications. By 2024-25, that figure had more than doubled to 10,193,579. The number of unique applicants rose far more slowly — from roughly one million to about a million and a half.
The arithmetic is unambiguous: each student is now applying to many more colleges. The same teenager filing in 2014 sent four or five applications. Her younger sibling, applying today, sends almost seven.
The surge is concentrated in one variable. Look at apps per applicant.
The mean number of Common App applications per applicant has crept upward almost every season: 4.63 in 2013-14, 6.64 in 2023-24, 6.80 in 2024-25.
That single metric quietly drives most of the story. Acceptance rates fall not because seats vanish, but because each seat now competes against more applications. Yield rates fall because admitted students are more likely to be choosing among multiple offers. ED becomes more attractive precisely because it removes the optionality that an over-applying student can no longer manage on her own.
A million and a half applicants. But who, exactly?
Common App's 2024-25 pool is 54.9% female, 45.1% male, with roughly a thousand applicants identifying as nonbinary or another gender category. By race and ethnicity, white applicants make up about 45.7% of those who self-identify, with Latino and Hispanic applicants the fastest-growing segment — up 15% year over year.
The income picture is harder to see directly, so Common App uses two proxies: whether an applicant qualified for a fee waiver, and whether their home ZIP code falls below the median. Both groups grew faster than their better-off counterparts. First-generation applicants have doubled since 2014-15 and grew another 7% last cycle.
So that is who is sending applications. What do colleges look at when they arrive?
Every fall, NACAC asks admissions officers to rate sixteen factors as considerable, moderate, limited, or not considered. The 2023 results, drawn from 185 four-year institutions, leave almost no ambiguity about what matters most.
Grades are king. 74-77% of colleges call grades a considerable factor — not just one of several, but the most important one. Strength of curriculum follows close behind. Then a wide gap. Character attributes, essays, and recommendations cluster in a second tier. Standardized test scores, once near the top, now sit near the bottom.
The fall of test scores deserves its own chart.
Through the 2010s, SAT and ACT scores sat in the second tier of admission factors at most colleges. Today they have collapsed into the fifth tier. Only 4.9% of NACAC respondents call them a considerable factor; most students no longer report scores at all.
The shift is not subtle. Grades and curriculum sit at one end of the chart; AP/IB exam scores, portfolios, interviews, and state graduation tests at the other. Standardized tests have crossed the midpoint and kept falling.
Beyond what colleges weigh, how often do they admit at all?
It is easy to forget, watching the headlines from a handful of HYPSM names, that the typical American four-year college accepts most of the students who apply. NACAC's 2022-23 data put the national average at 73%. Public institutions admit at 78%, private institutions at 70%.
The famous selectivity belongs to a sliver of the system. It is exactly that sliver that the Common Data Set lets us study one school at a time — and it is exactly that sliver that drives the application surge from Chapter I.
The selective sliver explains another anomaly: the early-round surge.
Early Action volume rose 17% in 2024-25. Early Decision rose 4%. The growth is driven by selectivity-anxious students hedging across as many early calendars as possible. The exception came at colleges that restored a test requirement: Brown saw ED applications fall by 1,200; Yale's restrictive early action dropped 14%.
At the most selective colleges, the math has gone in the other direction. Middlebury fills 60% of its class through Early Decision. Grinnell fills 67%. Each year the share of seats available in Regular Decision shrinks, which compresses RD acceptance rates and feeds the next wave of early applications.
A separate question hung over the 2024 cycle: what would happen after SFFA?
In June 2023, the Supreme Court ended race-conscious admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Common App's June 2024 brief looked at five years of self-reported race and ethnicity across its platform — and found no meaningful deviation in self-identification or application behavior in the first post-decision cycle.
That does not mean SFFA had no effect; admit rates and enrollment yields are tracked elsewhere and still being studied. It means that at the application stage, students continued to identify and apply much as they had before. The visible, near-term shock was absent.
For all that the public data tells us, much remains hidden.
The Common App and NACAC publish a great deal — and withhold a great deal more. Neither releases per-college admissions data: that has to be assembled college-by-college from Common Data Sets. Neither tracks the high-school-to-college link that would tell us which feeders place where. Hook multipliers — legacy, donor, athlete — surface only through lawsuit discovery.
Yield rates are recorded by NACAC in aggregate but not at the institution level. Financial aid, the single biggest determinant of where admitted students enroll, is absent entirely. That is why simulation matters: where the public series stops, a model has to extrapolate.
The NACAC factor importance table is the single most directly actionable artifact for calibration: it maps almost cleanly onto the scoring formula a simulation has to write down. Combined with Common App's apps-per-applicant series, it tells the model how many shots each student takes and what counts when those shots land on a desk.
Where the public series stops, a Monte Carlo begins.