Hey everyone, Cornell has released in-depth statistics for the class of 2022, and I thought I’d share some of the results here. For anyone applying next year, these numbers would be good to keep in mind.
University Yield: 61%
Acceptance rates by College:
Hotel School: 21%
Human ecology: 17.0%
ILR: 15.9% (acceptance rate has risen in recent years due to higher profile of Dyson)
CALS: 11.5%
Architecture: 11.4%
Arts and Sciences: 10.9%
Overall acceptance rate: 10.6%. This includes the waitlist. Without the waitlist, it was 10.3%
Engineering: 9.6% (noteworthy that it was 6.2% for men and 18% for women)
Dyson: 2.9%
It is also worth noting that Cornell’s ED acceptance rate was 24.3%, and RD was 8.3%
@Liveontheedge
They haven’t released ED results by college, but since the overall ED acceptance rate is ~25% and the overall acceptance rate is ~10%, as a rough estimate you can assume the ED acceptance rate for each college is 2.5x its overall acceptance rate.
It may (and probably does) vary for each college though
@UglyMom when they separated Dyson from CALS, more people realized Cornell has its own undergrad business school. Dyson AEM and ILR are both majors that are on the business track, and when students who may have previously applied to ILR found out about Dyson, they decided to apply there instead
@Llamatown So when students want to apply to Dyson they apply through CALS? Can they also apply through the hotel school? Has this change affected the admission statistics of CALS or the Hotel school or only ILR?
@UglyMom before 2017 they had to apply through CALS, but now they apply directly to Dyson. Since the separation, CALS has seen a decrease in applications, but also a decrease in class size becuase of the removal of dyson, so the acceptance rate hasn’t been affected much.
ILR’s decrease in applications is due to people wanting to apply to Dyson instead becuase of the similarities in career paths and the higher perceived prestige of Dyson. This has also happened to the hotel school, but not as much as ILR
@Llamatown Thanks! Interesting information. Still I find it confusing. It’s combined with the Hotel School but located in in CALS, and it’s in direct competition to ILR. I wonder why they didn’t include ILR like they included the Hotel School. It looks like they are hurting their ILR students by this arrangement. How do students choose one school over the other? Isn’t this going to make employers assume that ILR students are just not as good as Dyson students?
@UglyMom It is a bit confusing. Here’s how the structure is set up:
Before 2017:
The hotel school is its own independent college
CALS fully houses all the normal CALS departments as well as Dyson
The ILR college fully houses the ILR major
On the Cornell application, students would apply to CALS as a whole if they wanted to be in Dyson or any other CALS major
After 2017:
Cornell’s SC Johnson college of business fully houses the hotel school
CALS fully houses all the normal CALS majors and departments
ILR still fully houses the ILR major.
Dyson is housed half by SC Johnson and half by CALS
Students would apply to Dyson directly on the application even though it’s still half part of CALS. It showing up as it’s own thing on the common application for Cornell as well as increased marketing alerted students of its presence and swayed them to apply to it instead of other related departments.
In with this change, the number of applications to Dyson increased by 350%. I don’t think they fully anticipated this or the effect it would have on ILR
My understanding is that going forward, all individual schools under Cornell SC Johnson College of Business (Dyson, Hotel School, Johnson) will be d-emphasized. Cornell SC Johnson College of Business will be the only name promoted. In this case, Johnson (ranked at 15) Dyson ( ranked at 7) will benefit and improve their rankings because of the number one ranking of Hotel School. Only Cornell SC Johnson College of Business (undergraduate and graduated) will be ranked by all ranking agencies in the future. All students who graduate from Cornell in business will have a degree from Cornell SC Johnson College of Business with their respective majors.
ILR was never a business school. People didn’t apply to ILR and thought they were getting a business degree. It is the Hotel school that was more similar to the business school with focus on hospitality. To be frank, it was a back door for many students to get a business degree from Cornell. As posted by @Milochie, they have now move them under SC Johnson. ILR was more for people who wanted go to law school or HR related work.
ILR was created to meet the needs of labor in New York. It morphed into the place where law-school-bound students gravitated. What we now call HR is a cousin to ILR’s original intent. Indeed, the school tried to weed out applicants who wanted “business.”
A lot of what’s happening with the business school is a response to how students were shaping and utilizing hotel school and Dyson, kind of like the tail wagging the dog. Before Dyson was Dyson it was just a major in CALS (or as we called it, the Ag School) called agricultural economics. We called it Ag Ec. NYS students gravitated there to get an “economics” degree without having to pay the prices of the the Arts & Sciences school. As time went on, few to no students were there to learn about agricultural economics. I think there was even a period during which the major was called applied economics and management (AEM). Eventually Cornell retrofitted Ag Ec into what the students were using it for anyway.
@oldfort ILR is not the same as a business degree, but often times the type of student that is interested in ILR (or hotel school) is also interested in AEM. It’s comparable to the fact that many students choose between physics and Computer Science. Two completely different majors, but the type of kid who is thinking about physics is very often also thinking about CS and vice versa.
Due to higher profile and raised preseige of Dyson recently, many applicants decide to put it down instead of ILR
@Llamatown - I have to respectfully disagree. Students who are interested in business would apply to Dyson (AEM back few years ago) and Hotel school. Most of those students end up in consulting, IB, hedge funds. Students from ILR end up going to law school or HR related work. On the ILR website:
My daughter went into IB (and is still there after 7 years) would have been uninterested with amount of reading required at ILR. She double majored in math/econ at A&S and took finance courses at AEM/Hotel. Most of her friends who wanted to go into business ended transferring AEM or Hotel, not ILR.
That being said, when finance companies recruit on campus ILR students are not excluded, as long as they have taken enough math/econ/finance courses.
@Llamatown - just because ILR applications went down over the last 2 years does not mean those applicants went to Dyson. I really don’t know how you could draw that conclusion (maybe some of those students decided to apply A&S for econ, government, psychology). If you look at the data, almost every school’s applications went up, except for ILR.
The biggest drop to ILR was from 2016 to to 2017. Was it the year that Cornell stopped offering option of applying to second school?
Thanks for posting. It’s interesting how much the Human Ecology applications have risen over the last few years…just five years ago, they had around 1,000 less applicants (big increase for for a small college)