Pre-college summer programs can be worth it for learning and testing a field, but most don't move an admissions decision on their own.

A good ACT score depends on your college list, but a 24 is a solid starting point because it beats about 79 percent of test takers.

A good SAT score is one that fits the colleges on your list. The national average for the class of 2025 is 1029, so scores above it beat the typical test taker.

At least seven colleges dropped required supplemental essays for 2026-27, including Georgia Tech, Tulane, UNC Chapel Hill, and the University of Georgia.

The number of US high school graduates is projected to peak at about 3.9 million in 2025 and then fall roughly 13%, to about 3.4 million, by 2041, according to WICHE.

As of the 2026-27 cycle, six of eight Ivy League schools require SAT or ACT scores again: Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Cornell, and Penn.

NYU's 2025-26 Common Data Set reports 10,340 admits from 114,125 fall 2025 applicants, a 9.1% acceptance rate.

Harvard's Class of 2029 admitted 2,003 of 47,893 applicants, a 4.18% acceptance rate. Its yield was about 83.6% (1,675 enrolled).

Penn admitted 3,570 of 72,544 fall 2025 applicants, a 4.92% acceptance rate, and enrolled 2,420, a 67.8% yield.

A summer research program asks a lot more of a student than most classes do: pick a real question, spend weeks investigating it, and be ready to defend what you found. That is precisely why it tends to leave a deeper mark than a typical summer activity.

If you’re an AP student in high school, this is a question you should know the answer to! There is no published number, and any specific figure you see quoted online is someone's estimate, not an official requirement. What Ivy League schools actually say about this, directly, is worth reading before trusting a number.

Every fall, students weigh the same trade-off: take the AP class and risk a harder grade, or stick with something easier and protect the GPA. It is a reasonable thing to worry about. It is also a question with a real, data-backed answer rather than just opinion.

This is one of the most searched AP questions there is, and it is also one of the few where the honest answer is that there is no fixed number. That is not a dodge. It is what CollegeBoard itself says, and it is what school counselors say too. But "it depends" is not very useful on its own, so this guide breaks down what it actually depends on.