{"id":27776,"date":"2026-08-27T11:01:34","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T15:01:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.philasd.org\/research\/?p=27776"},"modified":"2026-08-27T11:01:34","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T15:01:34","slug":"a-summary-of-the-2024-25-school-selection-process","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.philasd.org\/research\/2026\/08\/27\/a-summary-of-the-2024-25-school-selection-process\/","title":{"rendered":"A Summary of the 2024-25 School Selection Process"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wpb-content-wrapper\" id=\"wpb-content-root\">[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Students living in Philadelphia have the opportunity to apply to attend School District of Philadelphia (SDP) schools of their choice through an annual school selection process. Students across all grades may apply to all available SDP K-12 schools, but 8th graders applying for 9th grade constitute the largest group of participants. During the 2024-25 selection process, each student could submit a maximum of five applications ranked in the order of their preference; and those applications could be to attend a catchment high school, a high school with citywide admission, or a criteria-based high school.<\/p>\n<p>This report continues our established annual reporting process and provides a summary of student participation, qualifications, and outcomes from the Fall 2024-25 school selection process (for enrollment in Fall 2025), with a focus on SDP 8th graders applying to criteria-based schools.<\/p>\n<p>The report also highlights a key change in 2024-25 \u2013 the introduction of a ranking algorithm that matched students to their highest-ranked admission offer during the lottery. This meant that students could receive up to 1 total admission offer in the initial lottery phase, a change from 2023-24 and earlier, where students could receive up to 5 initial offers, regardless of other offers they received.<\/p>\n<p>Key findings include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Overall participation (internal and external students):<\/strong> Across all grades, a total of 16,878 different students submitted at least one application to a District school or program during the 2024-25 school selection process. Consistent with historical patterns, the majority (10,471) of all applicants participating in the school selection process were 8th graders seeking admission to 9th grade.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Qualifications (SDP 8th graders only):<\/strong> Based on pre-application student qualification levels, approximately one-half (50.6%) of all 8th Grade Potential Internal Applicants met or exceeded the Minimum qualification level for criteria-based (CB) high schools in 2024-25. This represents a small increase from 2023-24 (which was 48.2%).<\/li>\n<li><strong>Applications (SDP 8th graders only; students can apply to up to 5 schools)<\/strong>: Overall, 62.4% of internal 8th graders applied to at least one criteria-based school in 2024-25; the same percentage that did so in 2023-24.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Applications (SDP 8th graders only; students can apply to up to 5 schools):<\/strong> Three out of every five CB applications (60.5%) submitted by 8th Grade Internal Applicants were submitted to a school where that student met the school\u2019s requirements (including attendance, grades, and standardized test scores). This is an increase of 1.4 percentage points from the 2023-24 rate of 59.1%.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Admission Offers and Student Responses (SDP 8th graders only; students may receive up to one offer of admission directly through the lottery process, and\/or one or more offers through the waitlist process):<\/strong> The percentage of 8th Grade Internal Applicants who submitted at least one eligible CB application and received at least one CB admission offer decreased from 97.5% in 2023-24 to 87.3% in 2024-25. However, the percentage of those offers that were accepted increased from 84.2% in 2023-24 to 93.9% in 2024-25. The net effect of these two changes was an increase in the number of accepted offers from 2,691 to 2,777.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n[\/vc_column_text][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner][vc_btn title=&#8221;Click here to view the report&#8221; align=&#8221;center&#8221; custom_background=&#8221;#0B315B&#8221; custom_text=&#8221;#FFFFFF&#8221; link=&#8221;url:https%3A%2F%2Fdrive.google.com%2Ffile%2Fd%2F1Cwiq7u01ouhMfxQMbJbc9xqpBEqJ3lsf%2Fview%3Fusp%3Dsharing&#8221; custom_hover_background=&#8221;#22779F&#8221;][\/vc_column_inner][\/vc_row_inner][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Students living in Philadelphia have the opportunity to apply to attend School District of Philadelphia (SDP) schools of their choice through an annual school selection process. Students across all grades may apply to all available SDP K-12 schools, but 8th graders applying for 9th grade constitute the largest group of participants. During the 2024-25 selection&#8230; <\/p>\n<div class=\"button minimal\"><a class=\"learnmore\" href=\"https:\/\/www.philasd.org\/research\/2026\/08\/27\/a-summary-of-the-2024-25-school-selection-process\/\">Read More<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":103956,"featured_media":27790,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[439,134,313,142],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-enrollment","category-equity","category-school-selection","category-system-trends"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philasd.org\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philasd.org\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philasd.org\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philasd.org\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/103956"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philasd.org\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27776"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.philasd.org\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27826,"href":"https:\/\/www.philasd.org\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27776\/revisions\/27826"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philasd.org\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philasd.org\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philasd.org\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philasd.org\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}