Some things just never get easier. Applying to college is one of them. It seems that with every year there comes a fresh spate of hurdles to overcome. Navigating the constantly changing rules about SATs. Dealing with the fallout of Supreme Court rulings. Feeling bad about all the things you should have done last summer to impress admissions officers. Add to the list the frequency with which you now have to update your list of safety schools.

The concept of Alt-Ivies is hardly new – T&C has covered this topic since the 1970s, when we published a list of 50 alternatives to Ivy League schools in our college-themed August 1973 issue (we revived a condensed version a few years ago). But there used to be some measure of predictability to it all. We have long known about the Little Ivies (selective liberal arts institutions like Amherst, Colgate, and Vassar) and the Public Ivies (University of Michigan, UVA, and Berkeley among them), and schools like Stanford, Northwestern, Duke, and Georgetown. And once upon a time, we used to be confident that certain party schools in Florida were easy gets, and anything in Boston not named Harvard or MIT could be a safe bet. Well, not anymore. You might recall that last year, Northeastern ended up at the top of our 2023 Alt-Ivies list with an acceptance rate that had plummeted into the single digits. (It’s also the dream choice of over-achieving kids at the most expensive boarding school on the planet.)

So as the future Class of 2029 gears up for another round of college admissions mayhem, we once again consulted the experts at IvyWise, who looked at metrics like sharp increases in applications, stark declines in admit rates, and other intel gathered from their contacts in the field, to create a list of the schools that are now as elite, competitive, and desirable as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. Below, introducing the top 15 Alt-Ivies of 2024