10 Colleges With the Highest Acceptance Rates

The U.S. News Short List, separate from our overall rankings, is a regular series that magnifies individual data points in hopes of providing students and parents a way to find which undergraduate or graduate programs excel or have room to grow in specific areas. Be sure to explore The Short List: College and The Short List: Grad School to find data that matter to you in your college or graduate school search.

While thousands of college applicants each year stress about getting into school, some may be able to take a more relaxed approach toward college admissions.

Prospective students eyeing Bismarck State College in North Dakota or Wayne State College in Nebraska, for example, can breathe a sigh of relief. These schools, along with eight others, had a 100 percent acceptance rate for first-time, first-year applicants for fall 2013, among the 1,288 ranked institutions that submitted data to U.S. News.

Of the 10 schools with a 100 percent acceptance rate, almost all were Regional Universities or Regional Colleges.

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Regional Universities offer a range of undergraduate degrees, some master's degrees and few doctoral degrees. Regional Colleges focus on undergraduate degrees and offer fewer than half their degrees in the liberal arts. The lone school on the list in the category of National Liberal Arts Colleges, made up of schools that award at least half of their degrees in liberal arts disciplines, is the University of Pikeville in Kentucky.

A number of schools came close to offering admission to all first-time, first-year applicants. Eighty-three schools had acceptance rates that were at least 90 percent but fell short of 100, including Cameron University in Oklahoma and Lewis-Clark State College in Idaho. Both institutions had a 99.8 percent acceptance rate for fall 2013.

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Schools with the lowest acceptance rates included primarily National Universities such as Stanford University, which accepted 5.7 percent of applicants, and Harvard University, which accepted 5.8 percent. National Universities offer a full range of undergraduate and graduate programs.

Below is a list of the 10 schools with the highest acceptance rates for first-time, first-year applicants for fall 2013. Unranked schools, which did not meet certain criteria required by U.S. News to be numerically ranked, were not considered for this report.

* RNP denotes an institution that is ranked in the bottom one-fourth of its ranking category. U.S. News calculates a rank for the school but has decided not to publish it.

Don't see your school in the top 10? Access the U.S. News College Compass to find acceptance rate data, complete rankings and much more. School officials can access historical data and rankings, including of peer institutions, via U.S. News Academic Insights.

U.S. News surveyed nearly 1,800 colleges and universities for our 2014 survey of undergraduate programs. Schools self-reported myriad data regarding their academic programs and the makeup of their student body, among other areas, making U.S. News' data the most accurate and detailed collection of college facts and figures of its kind. While U.S. News uses much of this survey data to rank schools for our annual Best Colleges rankings, the data can also be useful when examined on a smaller scale. U.S. News will now produce lists of data, separate from the overall rankings, meant to provide students and parents a means to find which schools excel, or have room to grow, in specific areas that are important to them. While the data come from the schools themselves, these lists are not related to, and have no influence over, U.S. News' rankings of Best Colleges or Best Graduate Schools. The acceptance rate data above are correct as of Dec. 16, 2014.

Delece Smith-Barrow is an education reporter at U.S. News, covering graduate schools. You can follow her on Twitter or email her at dsmithbarrow@usnews.com.