<p>So, my question is, why is CMU's acceptance rate so high?
Though 30% of an acceptance rate is considered 'most selective', I don't get why it is fairly a high rate compared to its peer schools.
UChicago: 13%
Georgetown: 20%
UCLA: 17.8%
UC Berkeley: 21%
Emory: 26.7%</p>
<p>I guess my real question is: How do you breakdown an acceptance rate?</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>CMU’s different schools are at different levels so it’s difficult to say. I bet you Tepper and Comp Sci have lower acceptance rates than Dietrich.</p>
<p>CMU’s acceptance rate on USNWR is somewhat misleading. Its based upon CMU’s Common Data Set (CDS) rather than the acceptance rates to each of CMU’s individual schools. </p>
<p>For fun (read: procrastination) purposes, I attempted to derive the relationship between the 2012-2013 Admissions Statistics per school (i.e. data on the admissions office website) and the acceptance data on CMU’s CDS. My results surprised me a bit:</p>
<p>Based on the Admissions Statistics:
Acceptance Rate = (admitted - BXA)/(applied - BXA) = 5725/30160 = 18.98%</p>
<p>Based on CDS Data*:
Acceptance Rate = (admitted)/(applied) = 4807/17313 = 27.77%</p>
<p>From this data, we can see that a relatively high portion applicants manage to get into to at least one CMU college. Many applicants who applied to the most competitive programs - SCS, Tepper, and CFA - applied to less competitive schools as “back-ups.” Thus, the CDS rate over-emphasizes the less competitive CMU schools and under-emphasizes Tepper, SCS, and CFA. </p>
<p>tl;dr - CMU’s overall rate is unfairly skewed upward because of its unique (and generous) policy of letting applicants apply to multiple colleges. I think the rate based on Admissions Statistics is a much better picture of CMU’s overall competitiveness. </p>
<ul>
<li>The CDS rate is lower because applicants aren’t “double-counted” on the CDS.</li>
</ul>
<p>The admission rate does indeed vary significantly by school. Here is a link to CMUs admission web page that details the individual school admission rates: [Carnegie</a> Mellon Admission | Admission Statistics](<a href=“http://admission.enrollment.cmu.edu/pages/undergraduate-admission-statistics]Carnegie”>http://admission.enrollment.cmu.edu/pages/undergraduate-admission-statistics)</p>
<p>I have a hard time believing UCLA is 17.8%… I got in but I didn’t get in Berkeley.</p>
<p>UCLA’s experienced a huge surge in applicants (at least I remember reading that somewhere). I think the UC’s are just weird. I was accepted by Berkeley but not LA. Plus I remember that they announced they would be accepting more out of state applicants and less instate.</p>
<p>Congrats on Berkeley! I would rather go to Berkeley than LA but at least UCLA is closer to home. What was Tepper’s and SCS’s admissions rate this year? I got in Tepper but waitlisted at SCS.</p>