The Four Numbers
| Measure | Formula | Answers |
|---|---|---|
| Acceptance rate | Offers ÷ applications | How hard is it to get an offer? |
| Yield | Enrolled ÷ offers | How many admitted students choose this school? |
| Matriculation rate | Enrolled ÷ applications | What share of applications became students? (Acceptance rate × yield) |
| Offer rate (UCAS) | Offers ÷ applications, where each applicant applies to several courses | How often does this course make an offer? |
One School, Three Rates
Harvard Law School's fall 2025 entering class, from its ABA 509 report, shows how far apart these numbers sit:
- 8,872 applications and about 816 offers: an acceptance rate of 9.2%.
- 483 of those admitted enrolled: a yield of 59.2%.
- 483 enrolled from 8,872 applications: a matriculation rate of 5.4%, which is 9.2% × 59.2%.
Present the 5.4% as an acceptance rate and Harvard looks almost twice as hard to get into as it is. That error is common, because enrolled class and applications are the two numbers schools publish most often.
When Only a Matriculation Rate Exists
Many schools publish applications and the size of the entering class but not how many offers they made. The University of Toronto's law school, for example, reported 2,771 applications and 219 enrolled students for 2025 entry (U of T). That gives a matriculation rate of 7.9%. Its acceptance rate is higher by an amount nobody outside the school can calculate, because it depends on a yield the school does not publish.
That is why the Toronto page on AdmitBase shows a matriculation rate labeled as one, not an acceptance rate. Wherever a school publishes enrollment but not offers, AdmitBase does the same.
Yield Tells You About the Competition
Across the 196 ABA law schools reporting for fall 2025, the median yield was 31.4%: a typical school enrolled fewer than one in three of the applicants it admitted. At the top end, Yale enrolled 77.4% of admitted students and BYU 81.1%. A school with a high yield needs fewer offers to fill its seats, so its waitlist tends to move less, and it has less reason to compete on scholarships.
Compare schools on numbers that mean the same thing.
AdmitBase labels every rate by what it measures and links the disclosure behind it, then scores your own numbers against each school. No account needed to see your top matches.
Check my chances →Offer Rates in the UK
UK undergraduate applicants apply through UCAS and list several courses on one application. A course's offer rate is the share of its applications that received an offer, but an applicant can hold offers from several courses and accept only one, so a high offer rate is not a high chance of a place. Small providers can report offer rates near 100%. AdmitBase labels these figures as offer rates for that reason.
National Acceptance Figures
National statistics usually count people, not applications. The AAMC's Table A-23 reports that 45.1% of applicants to US MD schools across 2023–24 to 2025–26 were accepted to at least one school (AAMC FACTS). That is a measure of the whole system, not any single school's acceptance rate: an applicant who applied to twenty schools and was accepted by one counts as accepted.
A Quick Check Before You Compare
- Does the number divide by offers or by enrolled students?
- Is the denominator applications to one school or applicants nationally?
- Which year's entering class is it?
- Is it the school's own figure, or someone's estimate?
Need these rates for every school, defined consistently?
AdmitBase's dataset records which rate each school publishes, with the source on every row, for advising offices, publishers and ed-tech teams.
See AdmitBase data access →
