At a Glance
Case Western admits 35.3% of applicants.
What You'll Actually Pay
See what families at different income levels actually pay after aid.
What families actually pay, by income level
After grants and scholarships. Before loans. Public school prices shown at in-state rates.
Source: College Scorecard / IPEDS, 2024-25
Where the Sticker Price Goes
Based on average need-based grant. Actual cost varies by family income — see chart above.
Debt at Graduation
44.9%
receive need-based grant aid
$29,079
average debt at graduation
Case Western graduates carry an average of $29,079 in debt.
Merit Aid
2,835
students received merit aid
$31,061
average merit award
Getting In
Case Western admits 35.3% of applicants.
Case Western Reserve University's Early Decision applicants are admitted at 1x the rate of Regular Decision applicants — 25% vs 35.6%. Note: ED is binding — you commit to attending if admitted.
SAT — Middle 50% of those who submitted · 52% of the class submitted
ACT — Middle 50% of those who submitted · 15% of the class submitted
70% were in the top 10% of their high school class.
What They Value
Academic
Nonacademic
Case Western Reserve University considers your essay Important — a strong essay can differentiate an otherwise average application. Demonstrated interest is Considered — showing genuine engagement with this school may help your application.
Student Life
52.9% of Case Western classes have fewer than 20 students.
Share of undergraduate class sections at each size, from CDS Section I-3. More red = more large lectures.
At Case Western, 52.9% of your classes will have fewer than 20 students.
Class size data reflects all undergraduate sections including labs, seminars, and lectures. Large research universities often have smaller upper-division and graduate-level sections that improve the overall distribution. First and second-year students typically experience larger classes than these averages suggest.
Source: Common Data Set 2025–26, Section I-3 (class sizes)
10:1
student:faculty ratio
Campus Life
From out of state (freshman class)
80.2%
Live on campus
72.2%
Men in fraternities
16%
Women in sororities
14%
Greek-life participation from the school's prior-year Common Data Set (2024-25) — not reported in Case Western's 2025–26 Common Data Set.
Who Attends
Racial and ethnic breakdown of enrolled undergraduates, as reported in each school's Common Data Set. "Unknown / Other" includes students who did not report or selected "other."
Case Western's student body is 32.6% white.
Popular Majors
Will They Graduate?
Case Western graduates 74.8% of students in 4 years.
Graduating late means paying for extra semesters. The 6-year rate tells you who eventually finishes — the 4-year rate tells you what it actually costs.
Case Western graduates 74.8% of students in 4 years.
What finishing late actually costs
Based on each school's published cost of attendance. Public school costs shown at in-state rates.
Case Western
74.8%
4-yr grad rate
Extra year cost: $85,851
Graduation rate data from Common Data Set 2025–26, Fall 2018 cohort (most recent available). 4-year rate = students completing in 4 years or less. 6-year rate = students completing within 6 years.
87.2%
Overall 6-yr rate
87.8%
Pell recipient rate
Lower-income students graduate at nearly the same rate as their peers — a sign of strong institutional support.
Freshman Retention
93.3%
93.3% of first-year students return for sophomore year.
City & Culture
Beyond the data — what it's actually like to spend four years in Cleveland.
Case Western has no real town of its own — it sits inside University Circle, a dense square mile four miles east of downtown Cleveland that also holds the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Severance Hall and the Cleveland Botanical Garden. The practical effect is that a student's daily radius includes a world-class art museum (free), an orchestra and two of the largest hospital systems in the country, all walkable, while the rest of Cleveland takes a bus or a train. The city is affordable in a way that coastal students find startling, and it is genuinely grey and cold from November through March.
Notable Alumni
Craig Newmark
Founder of Craigslist, who earned both his bachelor's and master's in computer science here before moving to San Francisco.
Class of 1975
Paul Buchheit
Created Gmail as Google's 23rd employee and proposed the company's "Don't be evil" motto, after a computer engineering degree here.
Class of 1998
Donald Knuth
Author of The Art of Computer Programming and the closest thing computer science has to a founding textbook, who arrived as a physics major and left with both a bachelor's and a master's in mathematics.
Class of 1960
Paul Lauterbur
Shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the work that made MRI scanning possible.
Class of 1962
Josh Radnor
Actor, writer and director, best known as Ted Mosby across nine seasons of How I Met Your Mother.
Class of 1996
Alumni selected for name recognition and range of fields. Not from the Common Data Set.
The City
Major city
Cleveland, OH
Best For
Traditions
The Hudson Relays
A 26-mile relay around campus, run each spring, that pits the four class years against each other and against an alumni team. It commemorates the 1910 move from Hudson, Ohio to Cleveland, and the winning class year is engraved on a rock outside Adelbert Hall. A class that wins all four of its years is taken to dinner by the president and provost — which has happened only a handful of times.
Springfest
The largest student-run event of the year, held at the end of the spring term: student bands, food trucks, inflatables and a headline act, planned entirely by students and running since 1998.
Free access to University Circle
Students get in free to the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History and the Botanical Garden, all within walking distance — an unusual amount of cultural access to treat as an ordinary weekday afternoon.
Spirit Week
The week of class-against-class competitions leading up to the Hudson Relays, which is how most first-years first meet the rest of their class year as a group.
Weekend Escapes
Within driving distance from Cleveland
Cuyahoga Valley National Park
35 minutesThe only national park in Ohio, with waterfalls, a towpath trail and a scenic railroad — close enough to be an afternoon rather than a trip.
Lake Erie shoreline and the Cleveland Metroparks
20 minutesBeaches, cliffs and the ring of parks locals call the Emerald Necklace, reachable without leaving the county.
Cedar Point, Sandusky
1 hourOne of the largest roller coaster parks in the world, and the standard northern Ohio day out.
Pittsburgh, PA
2 hoursThe nearest other major city, with its own museums, neighborhoods and pro sports.
Toronto, ON
5 hoursThe nearest international city by road, far enough to be a long-weekend trip; a passport is required.
Getting There & Game Days
Nearest airport
Cleveland Hopkins International Airport (CLE)
30 minutes from campus
For international flights: Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport (DTW) — about 3 hours by road, or a short connecting flight from cleveland.
Pro sports nearby
- Cleveland Browns NFL
- Cleveland Cavaliers NBA
- Cleveland Guardians MLB
Career Proximity
Case Western's career advantage is measured in blocks rather than miles: the Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals, two of the largest academic medical systems in the United States, run their flagship hospitals inside the same square mile as the campus, so clinical work, shadowing and lab placements are a walk. Cleveland's second layer is manufacturing and materials — Sherwin-Williams, Lincoln Electric, Parker Hannifin and NASA's Glenn Research Center are all in the metro — which is what makes the engineering side of the university unusually well-connected for a school of this size. Corporate headquarters and finance sit downtown, four miles west.
Top Industries Nearby
Major Employers
- Cleveland Clinic
- University Hospitals
- Sherwin-Williams
- NASA Glenn Research Center
- KeyBank
Downtown Cleveland — about 20 minutes by rapid transit; University Circle itself is the metro's second-largest employment district
Who Thrives Here
Case Western sits in University Circle, a square mile of Cleveland it shares with the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Orchestra — so the campus reads less like a college town than like a research district students happen to live in, and 72.2% of them do live in university housing. The Hudson Relays, a 26-mile class-against-class relay run each spring to mark the university's 1910 move to Cleveland, sits closer to the center of campus identity than anything Greek does — though 16% of men and 14% of women joined a fraternity or sorority the last time the school reported it, and it left both rows blank this year. Academically it runs small and lab-heavy, with a 10:1 ratio, 52.9% of sections under 20 students and 93.3% of first-years returning — and it leans hard toward the sciences, with engineering alone at 22.76% of bachelor's degrees and biology another 15.98%. The aid is genuinely strong: 100% of demonstrated need met, an average package of $63,412, and Pell recipients finishing within six years at 87.8% against 87.2% for everyone else — a gap that runs the right way, which is rare. The trade-offs are the $71,410 sticker before aid, $29,079 of average debt for those who borrow, and a four-year graduation rate of 74.8% that trails the 87.2% six-year figure by enough to suggest a fifth year is common here.