Notre Dame is a large private Catholic research university. The school is known for exceptional academics and enviable culture. From globally renowned professors to some of the best sports culture in the game, Notre Dame is a powerhouse. They are second in the country for student Fulbright winners, and nationally renowned for supporting their students in achieving outstanding outcomes beyond graduation. It’s also a strong religious university. 82% of students identify as Catholic. This combination of academic excellence, extracurricular achievement, and religious centering makes Notre Dame a dream school for many applicants, even many who are not Catholic.
The first-year acceptance rate for Notre Dame has plummeted recently, falling every year since the Class of 2022 admissions cycle. A large part of this drop has been a huge rise in the number of applications Notre Dame has received year-over-year. For the fall of 2024, the university received nearly 30,000 applications and accepted only 11%. Just a year later, for the Class of 2029, the overall acceptance rate dropped to 9% and 12.9% for the Restrictive Early Action round. They offer Restrictive Early Action or Regular Decision avenues for first-year admission.
What is Restrictive Early Action at Notre Dame?
Restrictive Early Action is non-binding, and students can wait until May 1, after nearly all college decisions come out. However, students who apply REA are not permitted to apply to any school in a binding Early Decision I program. They can, however, apply Early Action to other schools, including both private and public colleges and universities. After you receive an REA decision from Notre Dame, you can also apply ED II to another school.
Notre Dame says that it is not easier to get into the university through the REA process than through RD. This isn’t exactly true, as the REA acceptance rate has been slightly higher than the RD acceptance rate in recent years. However, this doesn’t account for the fact that there are students in the REA round who were nearly certain of admission before pressing submit, especially recruited athletes.
They also say that REA shouldn’t be an applicant’s automatic choice even if Notre Dame is their first choice school. This is absolutely true, and is something that we work with students to assess.
The most important thing when applying to Notre Dame is that you submit your strongest application possible. If you need your first semester senior year grades to boost your GPA and strengthen your transcript, you should not submit REA. But if your grades look fabulous coming out of junior year, REA may be a great option. Same goes for leadership positions, which we will go into more below. If your leadership roles are all piled into senior year, you may want to wait to apply until the winter so that you can amplify the impact of these roles. However, if you have had strong leadership opportunities before senior fall, that may not matter as much.
If you aren’t sure whether REA Notre Dame is the path for you, get in touch. We help students make sense of the options to forge their perfect path.
In this post, we’ll break down what you need to do to pull together an impressive Notre Dame REA application. Some of these things can be done quickly, even last minute, and others take years of work and preparation. We advise students to do them all, so be prepared to dig in.
Why should I apply REA?
We love early application options. They typically give students a boost, even if a modest one, acceptance-rate wise, and they offer an opportunity to underline your passion for a particular school. However, early application options aren’t for everyone. If you aren’t ready to submit come deadline, submitting early is the wrong option. If you could be more impressive with a few more months work, sacrificing that time to submit REA isn’t worth it. But if you are in a strong position for REA application, applying to Notre Dame early is a powerful choice.
What can you do to increase your chances of admission REA to Notre Dame?
There are clear and actionable things that students can do to increase their chances of admission to Notre Dame REA. Below, we’ve broken them down. Remember, some of these benefit from time while others can be acted on when time is tight, so be sure to consider each and take action early.
Grades
The first thing the admissions officers at Notre Dame look at is your academic performance in high school. There is no minimum GPA and no class rank requirement, but they expect an exceptional transcript. This means excelling in everything, not only in the courses that are in your areas of strongest interest or that you are naturally adept at. Notre Dame is very clear about this. They say that, “the more rigorous your course selection, the better your grades, and the higher your class rank, the more competitive your application will be.”
If students have limited access to advanced classes at their high school, we challenge them to prepare for AP tests independently, or with a tutor, and to pursue additional coursework at a local community college or through accredited summer programs. These should be true courses, not a short ‘academic experience,’ and your school should pre-approve anything you sign up for, confirming in writing that it will be added to your transcript alongside your more conventional courses. This means planning in advance, and is why we love to start working with our students by sophomore year to ensure that they are pursuing the hardest course load accessible through creative thinking and partnership with their administration.
Notre Dame does also have some requirements for an applicant to be considered for admission. Applicants must have completed:
4 units of English
3 units of Mathematics – Algebra I and II, Geometry
2 units of Foreign Language – both in the same language and a language offered by Notre Dame
2 units of Science
2 units of History/Social Science
But remember, these are the bare minimums. Notre Dame would rather see 3-4 units in every section, especially if you want to major in a STEM field. For some science and math majors, additional science and math courses are even required.
Regardless of your prospective major, if you are a prospective applicant, you definitely must verify what you need to have taken years before you plan on applying so you don’t find yourself in a tough spot at the last minute.
Scores
Notre Dame is test optional through 2025-26, which means that you don’t need to submit SAT and/or ACT scores for application consideration. However, not being required to submit scores is not the same as scores being irrelevant to your chances in the application process.
We have found that strong SAT or ACT scores are a powerful way of underlining an impressive transcript. These scores aren’t subject to grade inflation, or the competitiveness of your school, so they serve to help balance out the ‘read’ of your application. But what’s a strong score? For Notre Dame, we encourage students to aim for composite scores of:
SAT – 1510 or higher
ACT – 34 or higher
Accomplishing this can require months of preparation and planning, and we coach our students to plan to take either test at least twice, or possibly three times. Pursuing professional test-prep can be hugely impactful in this process. Both the SAT and ACT benefit from a professionally-guided strategy, so it’s worth investing the time and energy into strengthening your odds of an impressive outcome.
Activities
What Notre Dame wants to see most when it comes to your activities are passions. They care deeply about what you do, and much more than about how much you do. Notre Dame looks for students with depth more than they prioritize breadth. Doing a bunch of ‘filler’ things does not a compelling application make. Notre Dame isn’t impressed by seeing you keep yourself busy for the sake of being busy. They are impressed by exceptionalism in your area of deepest interest. This doesn’t however, mean only doing one thing.
So, if you like economics, you need to explore it through many angles. Join or start a club, and grow to lead it. Participate in Quiz Bowl, and take additional courses outside of school to immerse yourself in the subject. Do independent projects, and aim for publication of your research in a prominent journal open to high school students. As we work with students, piecing together this puzzle is one of our favorite things to do with our kids. Working with them to identify a passion and dig into it, deeply, and often beyond what they thought was possible for a high school student, is a ton of fun.
One of the things we — and Notre Dame — want to see no matter your area of academic interest is leadership. The university cares a lot about attracting and cultivating leaders, so you absolutely want to have no fewer than two leadership positions that you can highlight on your application, which could include club head, team captain, editor-in-chief, or nearly anything else that puts you at the top of the pyramid.
Essays
Applying to Notre Dame is serious business, but they want your essays to bring levity to your application. Taking yourself seriously is important to find success, but taking yourself too seriously takes all the fun out of life and would suck the soul out of the Notre Dame campus.
When the admissions officials are reading your application, they want to smile when they get to your essays. Look for opportunities to bring joy and excitement into your writing, and always led with story. To give you a sense of what this may entail, let’s break down the essays from a recently accepted student.
To emphasize his interest in business and finance, the student wrote about waiting in line overnight to buy limited edition sneakers as a middle school student, and then flipping them for a profit. The student also wrote about a unique family structure that built a personality grounded in openness and acceptance. And when it came to an object they’d bring to campus, it was all about a particular golf bag. Finally, they found a fun way to write about how all humans are time travelers simply by existing on a planet with gravity, and that particular supplement is still one of our favorites of all time.
To pull off this type of writing that is exciting, fun, thought-provoking, and even inspiring, it takes time. We advise students to begin working on their essays and supplements early in the summer before their senior year. For our kids, though, the work actually starts months, if not years, in advance. Before you can write the stories, after all, you need to make them.
Last, Apply Early
Finally, if you are going to apply early you need to, well, apply early. Is this obvious? Yes, yes, it is. However, it still needs stating. If students are wishy-washy about whether they are going to submit early, that makes for a weak application. Instead, you need to commit. Decide what you want to do (with guidance, if possible), and make it happen. Put in the time on your work in school and outside of the classroom, and don’t skimp on writing time. If you don’t take the time to develop a strong story, your hard work isn’t as impactful on your application as it could be.
Work with Us
A key part of the college application process, especially when applying to highly-selective schools, is strategy. Simply having the scores and grades and profile, and wanting it, is not enough. You have to go beyond that, and working with an expert does exactly that. We help our students show their best and strongest self, and it pays off. If Notre Dame is your top pick, get in touch.
Applying to college benefits from an expert touch. That’s exactly what we offer. Learn more.