Selective, Target, Safe schools among Forbes 500

Every year, Forbes compiles a list of Top schools based on a set of factors, including graduation rates, graduate salaries, great outcomes for low-income students, reasonable prices and even number of notable people among each school’s alumni. We will look at Forbes’ 2023 top 500 schools (https://www.forbes.com/top-colleges/) and their admission rates.

Forbes 500 is a very thorough list and is a great resources for learning about various schools, how to compare them and ultimately making a decision to apply. The picture below also shows that acceptance rate is far from the only important criteria and everyone can find safe schools on the list to apply to.

Let see ten school with the lowest and the highest acceptance rates.

We start with ten Forbs 500 schools with the lowest acceptance rate.

School	2022 Acceptance rate	Forbs 500 Rank
California Institute of Technology	3.92	47
Stanford University	3.95%	3
Harvard University	4.01%	9
Massachusetts Institute of Technology	4.11%	4
Columbia University in the City of New York	4.13%	6
Princeton University	4.38%	1
Yale University	5.31%	2
Brown University	5.51%	15
University of Pennsylvania	5.87%	8
Duke University	5.89%	17

Below are ten Forbs 500 schools with the highest acceptance rate.

School	2022 Acceptance rate	Forbs 500 Rank
Portland State University	98.43%	446
Saint Mary's University of Minnesota	97.79%	453
California State University-Fresno	97.28%	166
University of Wyoming	96.78%	278
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology	96.72%	299
Sam Houston State University	96.58%	481
Christian Brothers University	96.57%	477
Brigham Young University-Idaho	96.57%	324
Western Washington University	96.10%	142
Texas A&M University-Texarkana	96.01%	50

Disclaimer: This article is based on 2010-2022 CollegeScorecard data (https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/).