NYC specialized high schools · 2014–2025
Roughly 26,000 eighth graders sit the SHSAT each fall. The number of offers that come back in March is set by how many seats the eight test schools hold. Over these twelve years the tester pool shrank by 7%; offers shrank by 21%.
Testers and offers differ by a factor of six, so they get separate panels rather than a shared axis. Both begin at zero. Hover anywhere to read all three panels for one year at once.
2021 is a pandemic artifact. Testers fell to 23,528 that year — the test was postponed and given in schools in January 2021. The pool recovered to 27,669 the next year. Do not read that dip as a trend.
Offers are not quite seats. An offer is what DOE extends in March; some are declined, and the schools backfill from a waitlist. Offers track seat capacity closely but are not identical to it.
Every number plotted above, as published. Discovery is the summer program that admits students scoring just below a school's cutoff; DOE only began reporting its participant counts in 2022.
DOE has never published SHSAT score distributions or per-school cutoff scores as data. Cutoffs appear only in the Specialized High Schools Student Handbook, one PDF per admissions cycle. Nothing on this page contains a score.
Offers by sending middle school only go back to 2022 on the open data portal. The 2015–2021 files were removed and now survive on DOE InfoHub behind a JavaScript file listing.
In the per-school file, any count of five or fewer is published as the string 0-5. That covers about 83% of sending schools' offer counts, so school-level totals can only ever be given as a range.
Per-school offers sum exactly to the citywide total in all twelve years, which suggests Discovery admits are already inside that total rather than added to it. DOE does not say so explicitly. Treat it as unresolved.