Notre Dame: Personalized Admissions Guide

This is not a generic “how to get into college” guide. It is written against your child: their grade, their GPA band, their course load, their intended major, their activities, and where they actually stand against Notre Dame’s published admitted-student profile.

You answer the free Lantern Check first. The guide is then built from your answers.

What is inside

• Where your child actually stands at Notre Dame. Their numbers placed against the SAT and ACT distributions Notre Dame published for its most recent enrolled class: SAT 1460 to 1540 with a median of 1500, ACT 33 to 35. Source printed on every figure.
• The round is the door. Notre Dame admitted 9% overall from 36,104 applications, but 1,617 of 13,711 Restrictive Early Action applicants, which is 12%. Restrictive Early Action is not binding, but it does restrict where else your child may apply early. We explain exactly what it forbids.
• What 50 current Notre Dame students did. We interviewed them about how they got in: what their profile looked like at your child’s grade, what they wrote about, and what they wish they had ignored.
• The waitlist, honestly. Notre Dame offered 2,186 applicants a waitlist place for Fall 2025. 1,475 accepted. 54 were admitted. We tell you what that means before your child pins hope on it.
• What to change, in order. A ranked list of what actually moves your child’s position, using Notre Dame’s own statement of which factors it weighs most.

What this cannot do

Notre Dame publishes no GPA distribution at all: the relevant fields in its Common Data Set are blank. We will not invent a GPA band to fill the gap, and we will not publish separate rates for Mendoza, Engineering, Arts and Letters or Science, because Notre Dame does not release them.

Every figure in the guide is printed next to the document it came from, so you can check it yourself. Where Notre Dame publishes nothing, we say so rather than estimate.