Top Colleges by Average SAT

Four-year colleges ranked by the average SAT score of admitted students, as reported to the U.S. Department of Education.

How to read this. Most colleges are test-optional, so these averages include only admitted students who chose to submit a score — the students most confident in it. The real average across everyone admitted is lower, often substantially. Treat these as context, not cutoffs: every school here admits students scoring below its average, every year.

Don't see a college you expected? Some schools are test-blind — they don't look at SAT or ACT scores at all, even if you send them. Those schools report no score data, so they cannot appear on a list ranked by SAT. That includes all nine University of California campuses: Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz. Their absence here says nothing about how selective or how strong they are — and if testing isn't where you shine, these are places where it will not be held against you.

Source: U.S. Department of Education, College Scorecard — public domain data, retrieved live.