Vanderbilt's Real Acceptance Rate, by Round and by School

Vanderbilt's headline acceptance rate for the Fall 2025 entering class is 5.38%, taken directly from Vanderbilt's own Common Data Set: 48,196 applicants, 2,593 admitted. That number is accurate, and it's also a blend of numbers that move very differently underneath it. Applicants who applied Early Decision were admitted at 14.09%. Everyone else was admitted at 4.09%. That's a gap of nearly 10 full percentage points hiding inside a single published rate, and it's before you even get to the fact that Vanderbilt's admit rate also varies sharply by which of its four undergraduate schools you apply through.

The Decomposition

| Round | Applications | Admits | Rate | Cohort | |---|---|---|---|---| | Overall | 48,196 | 2,593 | 5.38% | Fall 2025 entering class, Common Data Set 2025-2026, item C1 | | Early Decision | 6,202 | 874 | 14.09% | Fall 2025 entering class, Common Data Set 2025-2026, item C21 | | Non-ED | 41,994 | 1,719 | 4.09% | Fall 2025 entering class, derived from C1 minus C21 |

Show the math: 874 of Vanderbilt's 6,202 Early Decision applicants were admitted: 874 / 6,202 = 14.09%. The Common Data Set reports a single combined Early Decision line item, so the non-ED figure is calculated by subtraction: 48,196 minus 6,202 is 41,994 applications, and 2,593 minus 874 is 1,719 admits. 1,719 / 41,994 = 4.09%.

One wrinkle in that math is worth flagging directly rather than smoothing over. Vanderbilt actually runs two binding early rounds, ED I, which closes November 1, and ED II (labeled "Other early decision plan" in Vanderbilt's own filing), which closes January 1. The Common Data Set doesn't break those two rounds out separately; both are folded into the single 6,202-applicant, 874-admit line reported above. That means the 14.09% figure covers both binding ED rounds combined, and the 4.09% "everyone else" figure is best read as effectively Regular Decision, since Vanderbilt's own reporting doesn't let us confirm the split with full precision. It's an honest limit of the filing itself, not a gap in our research.

There's a second small discrepancy worth naming. Vanderbilt's Common Data Set (48,196 applied, 2,593 admitted, 5.38%) and Vanderbilt's own admissions marketing profile, the "Vanderbilt at a Glance" page, report a slightly different total for the same Fall 2025 cohort: 48,658 applied, 2,592 admitted, 5.33%. The two figures likely come from different data-pull dates between Vanderbilt's institutional research office, which files the CDS, and its undergraduate admissions office, which runs the public-facing profile page. We used the CDS figure as the headline number here because it's the standard, cross-year comparable filing. The by-school breakdown below necessarily uses the admissions profile's own totals, because that's the only source where Vanderbilt publishes a school-level split, and the four school totals sum exactly to that page's own top-line numbers. The two headline figures don't tie out to the decimal, but they're close enough, and transparent enough about their own sourcing, to trust both for what each is measuring.

The Real Breakdown, by School

You don't apply to "Vanderbilt" as one undifferentiated pool. You apply to one of four undergraduate schools, and Vanderbilt publishes admit rates for each:

| School | Fall 2025 admit rate | Fall 2024 admit rate | |---|---|---| | College of Arts & Science | 4.35% | 4.82% (1,538 / 31,910) | | School of Engineering | 5.90% | 6.14% (695 / 11,317) | | Peabody College | 12.62% | 13.78% (275 / 1,996) | | Blair School of Music | 20.15% | 22.68% (154 / 679) |

Source: Vanderbilt's official "Vanderbilt at a Glance" admissions profile page, Fall 2025 undergraduate applicant pool, with Fall 2024 figures from an archived capture of the same official page.

Read straight, a student applying to Blair School of Music this cycle was admitted at more than four and a half times the rate of a student applying to the College of Arts & Science, Vanderbilt's largest school by far. Both students would say they're applying to Vanderbilt. Only one of them is applying at anything close to the 20% mark. Every school on this list also got tighter year over year, not just Arts & Science: Engineering, Peabody, and Blair all posted lower Fall 2025 rates than Fall 2024, with Blair's decline the steepest in relative terms, down more than two points in a single cycle.

Why the Gap Is This Big

The Early Decision gap and the by-school gap come from two different mechanisms, and it's worth keeping them separate. The ED gap is about certainty. An ED admit has signed a binding agreement to enroll and withdraw every other application, so Vanderbilt knows the seat is filled the moment it admits that student. A Regular Decision admit is a probability Vanderbilt has to plan around, because RD admits are typically weighing multiple offers, and schools have to admit conservatively when they can't know in advance how many RD admits will actually enroll. That uncertainty pushes the non-ED rate down; it doesn't mean the non-ED applicant pool is weaker, it means Vanderbilt is managing yield risk that simply doesn't exist for a binding commitment.

The by-school gap is closer to a supply-and-demand story. Blair School of Music and Peabody College are smaller, more specialized programs with fewer applicants competing for a set number of seats. The College of Arts & Science, by contrast, draws the largest applicant pool of the four schools by a wide margin, which is exactly why it also pulls Vanderbilt's blended headline rate closer to its own number than to Blair's or Peabody's. A school-specific rate is a real signal about how many seats exist relative to demand in that specific program; a campus-wide rate mostly tells you about the size of the biggest pool.

What This Means for Your Application

Two things to hold at once here. First, ED at Vanderbilt is binding, and it forecloses financial aid comparison the same way it would anywhere else: an ED admit is agreeing to enroll before seeing what any other school, Vanderbilt included in relative terms, would ultimately offer. If comparing aid packages across schools matters to your family, that comparison needs to happen before you apply ED, because a signed commitment removes your ability to negotiate afterward.

Second, and just as important: the 14.09% versus 4.09% gap describes two different applicant pools, not the same applicant's odds under two different rules. Students who apply ED to Vanderbilt have typically already decided it's a clear first choice, often without needing to weigh aid offers elsewhere. Students in the non-ED pool include plenty who would have been just as competitive in the ED round but chose to wait for reasons unrelated to the strength of their application. Reading 14.09% against 4.09% as if it's a straight multiplier on one identical student's chances overstates what the binding commitment itself is actually buying.

The school-level numbers add a layer most rate roundups skip entirely. The school you select on your application sets a real range before anything else about your file gets read, from 4.35% at Arts & Science to 20.15% at Blair. If you're comparing Vanderbilt against other schools on your list and want to weigh a specific school's actual numbers rather than one campus-wide figure, our college list builder uses real, school-specific admit rate data instead of a single blended number.

The Waitlist

Vanderbilt's Fall 2025 Common Data Set reports that 207 students were admitted from the waitlist. That's the only waitlist figure Vanderbilt disclosed for this cohort. The filing leaves both "number of qualified applicants offered a place on the waiting list" and "number accepting a place on the waiting list" blank, in both the 2025-2026 and the prior year's 2024-2025 filings. Vanderbilt reports how many students it ultimately admitted from the waitlist (207 for Fall 2025, 279 for the prior year), but not how large the waitlist pool was to begin with or how many students accepted a spot on it. Without an offered or accepted figure, there's no way to calculate a true waitlist admit rate for Vanderbilt, and that's a gap in Vanderbilt's own disclosure, not something we could derive from elsewhere.