Short answer first. Before an acceptance rate can be compared, it has to exist, and in most of the world it does not. Of the 500 universities in our database, 148 publish an acceptance rate. The missing 352 are not hiding bad numbers; whole systems, Germany, China and the Netherlands among them, admit by examination or qualification and have no rate to publish. Every acceptance-rate list is silently a list of the countries that count.
Coverage, country by country
| Country | Universities in our data | Publish a rate | Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brazil | 18 | 18 | 100% |
| Russia | 12 | 12 | 100% |
| Hong Kong | 8 | 8 | 100% |
| United Kingdom | 45 | 12 | 27% |
| United States | 250 | 53 | 21% |
| Australia | 30 | 1 | 3% |
| Netherlands | 10 | 0 | 0% |
| Germany | 18 | 0 | 0% |
| China | 25 | 0 | 0% |
The pattern is institutional, not national character. Brazil, Russia and Hong Kong publish for every university we track, because their admissions run through centralised, statistics-publishing systems. The United States publishes patchily: 53 of our 250 US universities, and the publishers skew selective, which is why the US mean of the published subset (23.2 percent) sits so far below the all-college American average quoted elsewhere. Britain publishes for about a quarter of its universities in our data, and even there the number splits: UniLink's origin-based analysis puts overall international acceptance for the UK at about 61.5 percent for 2026, a figure built from applicant origin rather than a single institutional rate.
The coverage map
The practical consequence cuts both ways. In a zero-coverage country, an applicant is not facing worse odds; they are facing a different game, qualification thresholds, entrance examinations and document lists, all of which are published and checkable in advance. In a full-coverage country the opposite trap waits: a precise-looking rate built on a definition of application that may not match the applicant's own route, since international, transfer and domestic applicants are often counted together. Coverage tells you which game you are in before you spend anything on it.
Use the map before using any rate. If a country shows zero coverage, the honest shortlist question changes from what are my chances to what are the entry requirements, which is a knowable list rather than a probability. Our by-country guide only lists countries where published rates exist, for exactly this reason.
Sources: listing form modeled on UniLink, acceptance rates listing; UK origin-based figure from UniLink's published analysis of 2026 admissions. Coverage counts recomputed from this site's dataset of 500 universities across 27 countries, November 5, 2026.