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The number of first-year college applicants grew across the board during the 2023–24 application cycle, according to the latest end-of-season report from the Common App. Over all, about 1.43 million distinct applicants submitted 9.47 million applications, an increase of 7 percent and 11 percent, respectively, from the 2022–23 cycle.
Some of the biggest growth was in the number of historically underrepresented student applicants. American Indian and Alaskan Native applicants saw the most significant increase at 15 percent, but the number of Latinx and Black applicants also rose, by 12 percent and 10 percent, respectively. The number of applicants from ZIP codes that have a median income below the national average also shot up year over year by 12 percent.
The growth occurred despite the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling banning the consideration of race in college admissions, and reinforces the findings of an earlier study the Common App released in June.
What did change in the latest report was where students applied. For the first time, the number of applications to public institutions (4.88 million) exceeded the number of applications to private ones (4.55 million). And many of the public institutions fall in the lower two quartiles of selectivity, which saw the most significant growth.
But even that followed the prevailing trend, as the number of applications to less selective public institutions has been on the rise for years.
“In general, and in alignment with our recent deep-dive research brief on the subject, we do not observe any appreciable changes from ongoing historical trends,” the report read. “The only exception is what seems to be a leveling-off of Asian applicants’ applications to the most selective members.”
