It's conventional wisdom that having a college education can be an enormous advantage in terms of furthering your career—and the data backs that up. With a college degree, you're more likely to make a higher salary, have improved health and retirement benefits, and find better career opportunities overall. Attending an especially selective school is considered an even greater advantage, affording prospective graduates opportunities others simply may not have, including higher lifetime earnings and important networking connections.
However, because tuition prices keep rising, a degree from a school with a high rate of post-degree employment can also entail some serious student debt.
Some coastal states, such as Massachusetts and New York, have multiple highly selective colleges. For instance, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University both accepted less than 5% of applicants for the 2025-2026 school year, according to data obtained by Forbes in March 2025. Other states, such as Utah and Arizona, have (by comparison) no highly selective schools. For instance, Brigham Young University, the most selective school in Utah, accepts 69% of students who apply. Arizona's most selective college, Ottawa University at Surprise, takes about 40% of applicants.
Though countless factors go into college admissions decisions, standardized testing scores may have played an especially significant role this year. After many universities dropped testing requirements from applications during the COVID-19 pandemic, some institutions—mostly Ivy League schools, like Yale University and Dartmouth College—have reinstated standardized test score requirements for applicants.
The return of standardized testing is one of the many ongoing conversations surrounding college admissions. After the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action in June 2023, ending the long-held practice of race-based admissions, schools like Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology saw a steep decline in enrollment among Black freshmen. A July 2025 analysis from the Urban Institute confirmed this trend, finding that although the number of Black and Latino college applicants increased from 2023 to 2024, fewer students from these demographics were accepted. Needless to say, the effects of the Supreme Court's decision will continue to reverberate across college admissions offices for many years to come.
In the meantime, we're breaking down the most selective colleges across the country. To determine which schools in each state are the most difficult to get into, Stacker combed through Niche's 2026 hardest colleges to get into rankings. Niche ranked the college's selectivity based on acceptance rates and SAT scores, using data from both the Department of Education and self-reported scores by Niche users. There were no colleges in Niche's ranking from Alaska, Delaware, Nevada, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Click through to the list to see the most selective schools in each state and to find out just how hard you'll need to hit that SAT prep book.
