Blog · College admissions · August 21, 2026
Nursing at NYU is harder to get into than Brown
Nursing at NYU is harder to get into than Brown. That sentence sounds backwards, which is exactly why it is worth writing down — and this time the source is NYU itself.
In its admission announcement for the Class of 2029, NYU reported offering admission to 7.7 percent of more than 120,000 applicants — and named the three undergraduate colleges that admitted fewer than 5 percent: the College of Arts and Science, the Stern School of Business, and the Rory Meyers College of Nursing. Brown, an Ivy League university, admits 5.2 percent overall.
Not on that under-5 list: Tisch, home of the world-famous film school. Families assume the arts school is the hardest door at NYU. By the university's own accounting, nursing is harder.
This is not an NYU quirk. American nursing schools turned away a record 93,176 qualified applications last year, 75,255 of them to entry-level bachelor's programs — not because the students weren't qualified, but for lack of faculty, clinical placements and seats. At the University of Connecticut, applications to the nursing class ran to 3,800 for roughly 225 seats, up from about 2,000 four years earlier.
Nursing runs its own gate at almost every university. Direct-admit seats are scarce, and the real cut happens at the program, not the campus. A famous name can be the easier path, and a "safety school" can hold the hardest door on campus. If your kid wants to be a nurse, build the list around the program: direct admit or secondary admission, how many seats, and the plan if you don't get one.
We keep returning to this theme because it survives every dataset we put it against: the University of California shows it, the Cal State system shows it, and now NYU says it about itself. The question is never "what are my odds at this college." It is "what are my odds in this program."
NYU figures are from NYU's admission press release of March 2025. Brown's rate is the latest IPEDS figure as published on our college pages. National figures are from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing's 2025 survey of 998 nursing schools; UConn figures are from the university's own publication, April 2024. Every UC and CSU program's admit rate — applied, admitted, five years back — is already on that college's page, and the methodology page explains the sources.