<p>Does a schools ranking for a certain program (engineering or business) affect how low or high the acceptance rate will be? For example, is it easier to get into Harvard for engineering than Cornell for engineering? </p>
<p>At the undergraduate level, your declared major before your freshman year has no bearing on your chances of acceptance. What I mean is, whatever the acceptance rate at Harvard or Cornell is the acceptance rate for all incoming freshmen. They do not base or depend that on your declared major because many are undeclared. So it is technically harder to get into Harvard (based on acceptance rates) than Cornell for engineering even though Cornell might have a higher ranked engineering school.</p>
<p>At graduate level, it’s different, because you’ve already completed a baccalaureate in something and that will affect your options available so it may actually be easier to get into Harvard grad engineering school even though it is not as highly ranked because they need to fill spots.</p>
<p>Acceptance rates and Rankings should be viewed separately. We can say they are correlated because of the mechanics of supply (applicants and spots) and demand (those trying to get in), but are not causal. </p>
<p>I would argue that it depends on the school. For instance if you apply to a certain major in a school, you may not be accepted to the major in that school especially if it is extremely competitive. For instance NYU Stern comes to mind and Michigan’s Ross. For most schools though, they have you declare after your first few years and your initial acceptance does not depend on your major or school.</p>
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<p>This may not be true for Cornell, as there are internal transfer admissions barriers for students who want to change majors across divisions. Schools with such internal transfer admissions barriers typically have different levels of frosh admission selectivity between different divisions. Cornell expects frosh applicants to choose a first choice and second choice division; presumably, this means that an applicant may be rejected by a first choice division but admitted to a less selective second choice division.</p>
<p>Check school policy. At Berkeley, applying EECS has around a 10% acceptance rate while the overall school acceptance is something around 20%. At CMU, you apply to up to 3 schools with declared majors and they have completely different levels of selectivity- CMU SCS is at 5% and overall comes out around 20% as well.</p>
<p>It depends on whether you’re applying for a major or declaring a major as you apply. They make this clear on the application- MIT, for example, explicitly says your major doesn’t matter.</p>
<p>I think Cornell does something simialr to Berkeley with its first choice/second choice system and might have additional criteria for specific majors on top of just getting in. Generally, the better programs do tend to be more selective- but not all schools have the same number of applicants (Division I sports programs + prestige = a bunch of applicants by underqualified candidates hoping to get lucky) or the same number of undergraduate seats, so don’t expect the correlation to be that useful. Check the number of incoming freshmen in that program/major and compare it to the applicant pool. This is entirely up to school policy, but I can tell you that Harvard isn’t any nicer to SEAS applicants.</p>
<p>Poorly crafted question. Harvard does not admit by major. Cornell admits by college. So it is different. I don’t think Cornell posts the admit rate for college of engineering separately. </p>
<p>Also colleges don’t have you declare major after ‘several years’. It is usually by end of 2nd year but for some majors you need to get started earlier or you will not be able to graduate in 4 years.</p>
<p>Cornell does break down admissions data according to college. I do not have the latest figures, but I do have the figures for 2011. </p>
<p>CAS: 17,057 applied, 2,641 accepted (15.5%)
Mid 50% SAT 1310-1510
Mid 50% ACT 30-33</p>
<p>Engineering: 8,696 applied, 1,787 accepted (20.5%)
Mid 50% SAT 1370-1530
Mid 50% ACT 31-34</p>
<p><a href=“http://dpb.cornell.edu/documents/1000003.pdf”>http://dpb.cornell.edu/documents/1000003.pdf</a>
<a href=“http://dpb.cornell.edu/documents/1000176.pdf”>http://dpb.cornell.edu/documents/1000176.pdf</a></p>
<p>It is fair to say that Cornell’s CAS acceptance rate is now around 10%, and the school of Engineering probably around 15%. The SAT and ACT ranges have likely risen slightly.</p>
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<p>This example shows how acceptance rates can be misleading. If you just go be acceptance rates, Cornell CoE is not as selective as Cornell CAS. But Cornell CoE ends up with a stronger frosh class, at least in terms of SAT and ACT scores.</p>
<p>It varies from school to school. My school (Northeastern) does admissions by college within the university. Your choice of college can impact your chance of admissions, but your major within that does not play a role. However, although they admit by college, they don’t release admissions statistics by college. So there is a lot of speculation as to which are the hardest to get into. The business program and engineering are generally considered more difficult, partly because they are quite well-regarded programs.</p>