<p>My son got admitted to Cornell engineering as an RCPRS scholar. He has never received a single marketing material from Cornell. Where as he has received boat loads of materials from MIT, Caltech and Harvey Mudd since he is a sophomore and Caltech’s and Harvey Mudd’s class size is so tiny. I am not even aware of highly ranked undergrad business that Cornell has. So it is possible if Cornell wants to be perceived as a more selective school they can achieve that by stepping up their marketing I guess. But I don’t think there is anything wrong with some sane acceptance rates. We are in mid-Atlantic.</p>
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<p>A single word, can, and almost always does, take on different senses in alternative contexts. I had a phenomenal linguistics teacher who used to admonish us about the “one word, one meaning fallacy.” This is particularly the case for a word like selectivity – it takes can take on different senses from one use, to another. I’m sure even admissions representatives will use the term in more than one of its various modes. Context is a key factor in the determination of meaning.</p>
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<p>Congratulations on your son’s engineering acceptance, as well as the wonderful research program honor. It’s really a terrific achievement.</p>
<p>Colm, thanks. Cornell is one of his top choices now. We are learning more about Cornell and RCPRS Scholar opportunities.</p>
<p>Banker, have you discovered this very informative recent thread about RCPRS yet?</p>
<p>[thread=1115801]H. Rawlings III Cornell Presidential Research Scholars (RCPRS)[/thread]</p>
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<p>What?? I’m not sure what kind of definition you are using for “self-selective”, but what you said doesn’t make sense to me.</p>
<p>what about it doesn’t make sense? If 60% of admitted students chose to enroll elsewhere, obviously many students had multiple choices and multiple options to choose from. I agree that there is a certain element of self-selectivity when deciding on engineering over CAS (where one can study plenty of math centric items), but not nearly as much as Hotel, AAP, ILR, etc. where the students who enroll are not only certain that it’s the major they want but it’s the individual college and then university they want (further reflected by the yield). There are few ‘backup’ options, and this caters to the definition of self-selectivity that I learned in my time of admissions. The unfortunate thing is a strong architecture portfolio or growing up with the name Hilton can’t be quantified, so it can’t be used the way others are in their definition of self-selective. You can, of course, define it as you wish.</p>
<p>No…I meant the applicant pool that applies to Cornell Engineering is already highly qualified (compared to CAS), so we cannot compare the percentage of acceptances across different schools since the people that apply to each cannot be compared. I’m not sure how what you are talking about relates to this.</p>
<p>oh, so you have information on the engineering and CAS applicant pool? Totally my mistake if you do.</p>
<p>Yeah, no problem- happens all the time.</p>
<p>While I agree that the Engineering pool is more selective than the Arts and Sciences pool, do not forget that many of the high powered applicants to Dartmouth, Brown, Harvard, etc. apply to CAS as opposed to Engineering. In my opinion, admission to Cornell Engineering is slightly more “predictable” than admission to CAS; in terms of overall difficulty, however, I would say CAS and Engineering are equal.</p>
<p>^ I really don’t think any of the engineering students are trying to take anything away from CAS, which I think they must know is a fantastic college. They have been simply working to understand the somewhat distinct nature of their own class and college, imo.</p>
<p>Hmmm, well, no use in arguing over schools within Cornell. After all, a Cornell graduate is a Cornell graduate- not quite sure why OP started this thread in the first place…</p>
The following are the acceptance rates in 2014 for the various Cornell colleges.
College Applicants Acceptance rate
Architecture - 1050 15.8
Arts & Sciences - 18592 13.5
Ag & Life Sciences - 7017 14.6
Engineering - 11893 13.0
Hotel Admin - 823 24.7
Human Ecology - 1948 21.9
Industrial Labor - 1661 13.9
reference http://irp.dpb.cornell.edu/tableau_visual/admissions
In addition, typically the admit rate for females in COE is much higher than males