Blog · From the data · October 2, 2026
400 acceptances is not 400 students
The angle
- Bronx Science's own college list prints 400 acceptances to Binghamton University in 2025. Those are offers, not seats.
- At the four schools that publish both kinds of list for the same years, offers run from 1.16 to 4.08 for every seat taken. There is no standard conversion.
- Bronx Science prints 400 acceptances to Binghamton University but publishes no number for how many of those students actually enrolled there.
A parent showed me a number this week and asked what it meant. Bronx High School of Science (The) publishes its own college list. In the column labeled 2025, next to Binghamton University, it says 400.
Four hundred. One high school, one year, one college.
Here is what that number is. It is an acceptances list, which means a list of the colleges that said yes. It is not a matriculation list, which is where a school says its graduates enrolled. A strong senior applies to many colleges and gets into several. She picks one. Every college that said yes still keeps its tally mark. So 400 acceptances to Binghamton means 400 yes letters, not 400 kids packing for Binghamton.
How wide is the gap between yes letters and seats? Four schools publish both kinds of list covering the same years. Their four answers are not close to each other. LASA H S in Texas printed 1,488 acceptances and 365 enrollments for the Class of 2025, which is 4.08 offers for every seat taken. Millburn High School in New Jersey printed 1,088 and 343 for the same class: 3.17. Sage Hill School in California printed 567 and 402 across 2023-2025: 1.41. Princeton High School in New Jersey printed 426 and 366 for the Class of 2025: 1.16. Those totals are our sums of the counts each school printed.
So the honest answer is a range. A shade over one offer per seat at one end, better than four at the other.
That means there is no number you can divide 400 by. Any divisor you pick is a guess. Bronx Science prints 400 acceptances to Binghamton. It publishes no number for how many of those students enrolled there. The school never said.
The same holds further down the list. In 2025 the school counted 278 acceptances to Stony Brook University, 159 to the University at Buffalo and 123 to Fordham University. It also counted 112 to CUNY Hunter College and 101 to the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Every one of those is an offer, not a seat. Read them that way and the list turns useful.
These figures come from the BXS College Profile, Class of 2026, the School Profile link on the school's own site.
So ask one question about any school's college list before you look at a single number on it. Offers, or seats?
Those are two different documents. Go look up your kid's high school on Reach and find out which one it publishes.