<p>Which one is harder to get into?</p>
<p>If consider yourself an aspirant for either combined with the fact that you can’t figure this out yourself – your particular chances are practically nil at both.</p>
<p>Hint for you: google “harvard admit rate” and “U Chicago admit rate”</p>
<p>^^
Harsh, but correct.</p>
<p>I’ve done that, and I find different results. Just wanted to have a clear answer. Not a sardonic one.</p>
<p>harvard is much harder to get into…
that said, chicago isn’t easy to get into either…</p>
<p>Here is a list of the top schools acceptance rates that will give you some idea of their exclusivity:</p>
<p>Stanford 5.69%
Harvard 5.79%
Yale 6.72%
Columbia 6.89%
Princeton 7.29%
MIT 8.2%
Chicago 8.8%
Brown 9.16%
Dartmouth 10.05%
Duke 11.58%
Penn 12.10%
Cornell 15.15%</p>
<p>Hope it helps. They are all going to be difficult to get into. Each school looking for slightly different student bodies to make up their “class”.</p>
<p>^woah…stanford is more selective than harvard???
well actually i’m not surprised…no one from my school has ever gotten in to stanford, while a few have gotten into harvard.
where’s UPenn?</p>
<p>Sorry, I forgot about Penn. I updated it. Penn is 12.10%.</p>
<p>FWIW: Last year’s early acceptance rates:</p>
<p>Harvard SCEA: 18.29%
UChicago EA: 13.38%</p>
<p>UChicago is a Division III athletic school and does not recruit student athletes in the early round. Harvard is a Division I school and probably recruits about 230 athletes in the early round (the maximum number allowed by Ivy League rules). This may account for the larger difference in EA acceptance rates. Taking recruited athletes out of the mix, a student’s overall EA chances are still better at UChicago than at Harvard. And UChicago has non-restrictive, non-binding early admissions, which means you can apply to a bunch of other schools early (MIT, Georgetown, UMich, Case Western Reserve, Northeastern, Ohio Wesleyan, etc). You can’t do that when you apply to Harvard SCEA. For students who are not ranked in the top 2% of their high school, this is often the better early route to go, as you will hopefully have at least one acceptance in your back-pocket come mid-December and still have a shot at Harvard, and all the rest, in the RD round.</p>
<p>Going beyond what Gibby noted: What seems to be the most popular smart strategy amongst the top students is to apply to Chicago, MIT, Caltech early action for those who are STEM inclined or Chicago, Georgetown for the more liberal arts people to at least get one acceptance before Christmas…save the RD for Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, etc…</p>
<p>…take advantage of this strategy before Chicago or MIT goes SCEA in the future…</p>
<p>@ilovediannaagron: I would caution against this line of thinking. These numbers don’t really mean much when they are that low. Stanford isn’t “more selective” than Harvard; just as Harvard isn’t more selective than Princeton. Sometimes it just so happens that more students apply to school X that has a Y number of spots available with a predicted yield of Z.</p>
<p>I just don’t want you to fool yourself into thinking that it’s easier, for example, to get into MIT than Yale, or that it’s easier to get into Princeton than it is to get into Yale. These numbers mean very little to hyper-selective schools.</p>
<p>To give you a real life example: just going through that list, I got into Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia and MIT. I got rejected by Princeton. Waitlisted by UChicago. Got into Dartmouth, but waitlisted at Duke. And last but not least, I also got rejected by Cornell, which, according to you, would probably be “the least selective” of that list.</p>
<p>selective and admit rates are not necessarily synonymous. Some not so strong colleges, have pretty low admit rates just because of an appealing location. Columbia, for instance, is strong but not worthy of its staggering low admit rate. If it were not for its NYC location it would probably have an admit rate around 10%. Chicago and harvard have quite similar admit rates. 5.6 vs 8.8. However, harvard is much more selective than chicago. The students who go to harvard generally have more on the table (research, experince, etc) than the kid going to chicago. In fact chicago has a lower admit rate than half the ivys yet most students admitted to both an ivy and chicago almost always select to attend the ivy (except cornell).</p>
<p>^^ That’s a bit of an outdated opinion (not to mention a lot of outdated “facts”). Might have been true 10 years ago, but certainly not true today.</p>
<p>Chicago and Harvard have approx. identical SATs, with Chicago having higher average SATs than MIT and Stanford. Harvard and Chicago both have extremely low admit rates, and it’s pretty hard to claim that a 5.8% admit rate implies higher selectivity than a 8.8% admit rate. Chicago’s 55% yield is pretty much identical to Columbia’s yield, despite Columbia’s ED. parchment.com’s research indicates that Chicago’s winning more cross-admit battles than every Ivy except HYP, and it’s getting pretty close to Princeton and Yale.</p>
<p>I think it’s a pretty justifiable statement to say that Harvard is the best university in the world. Its 80% yield shows that it can get pretty much anyone it wants to attend. If it dug deeper into its pockets, it could really devastate the competition. That being said, a handful of universities are posing a threat to Harvard’s dominance, especially Stanford, MIT, and Chicago. East-coast elitists will always challenge Chicago being regarded anywhere near Harvard’s position, but it’s becoming an undeniable reality that Chicago will soon be a force to be reckoned with.</p>
<p>^i would be interested in seeing those cross admit numbers…a study done by wharton found that all the ivys, except cornell, where chosen over chicago. Even schools like duke and georgetown and notre dame were chosen over uchicago. I think the study was done about five years ago. i cant imagine in those five years it would jump above every school but HYP…especially considering stanford does very well in the cross admit game, i doubt uchicago outperforms them</p>
<p>^^ I agree - and stanford does exceedingly well in the cross-admit game, only losing out to Harvard (as of 2010 data) with a yield of 77% - Chicago doesn’t come close to it…</p>
<p>What is the point of all of this? Does the fact that more people choose vanilla than any other ice cream flavor mean that you are always going to choose vanilla because it must be the best? If you like mocha fudge, then mocha fudge is the best, at least for you. Same with colleges that are essentially equivalent in terms of education (as are all of the colleges we are talking about here, or almost all). They all have slightly different flavors, but any of them can be a particular person’s favorite.</p>
<p>Anyway, I don’t know where all of you are getting your information about cross-admit preferences, because the colleges guard that information very carefully. The study that gets cited all the time is about 10 years old, and used data that was a lot older than that, basically late 90s. It relied on student self reports, and used a controversial methodology to extrapolate preferences where there were not large enough samples of actual cross-admits to produce reliable numbers. So the study was at best vaguely accurate as of 15 years ago, which means almost nothing now if you are talking about Stanford vs. Harvard or Chicago vs. anyone. Other sources of cross-admit data are even less systematic.</p>
<p>“The study that gets cited all the time is about 10 years old, and used data that was a lot older than that, basically late 90s.”</p>
<p>^^ UChicago is not even listed in that study: <a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/09/17/weekinreview/20060917_LEONHARDT_CHART.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/09/17/weekinreview/20060917_LEONHARDT_CHART.html</a></p>
<p>^^very old study indeed. If you ask most unbiased objective college admissions officers/counselors/experts in college admissions today and going forward most would say that Stanford will tie and surpass Harvard’s yield rate either next year or the following year. Stanford has already surpassed Harvard’s acceptance rate as being the most exclusive school and very few people in the past thought that would ever happen. As the acceptance rates and yield rates for Harvard, Princeton, Yale have been stagnant for several years now without much movement…the acceptance and yield rates of Chicago, Stanford, and MIT have been closing the gap dramatically in recent years. Most students don’t realize MIT’s yield is about 72-73% which is higher than Princeton’s or Yale’s…</p>
<p>…in terms of which school is more selective or more desirable is in the eyes of the beholder…
Look at Yab123’s cautionary tale in the earlier post as to what happened to his adventure…</p>
<p>…apply wisely…be realistic…don’t be arrogant or ignorant of the present day zeitgeist in college admissions…you don’t want to be left not getting into any of your favorite schools come April of next year…</p>
<p>@gravitas: you can’t give an opinion and say it is “unbiased” at the same time. Opinions are biased.</p>
<p>Not sure where you are getting your information from either. I really don’t like this “Harvard is better than Stanford” or vice versa type of arguments, because they are pretty silly. But, since you are giving misleading “facts,” I have to counter some of them.</p>
<p>Yield at Harvard has moved from 77% to 82% in the past two years. That is not stagnant by any measure. In fact, the difference between Stanford and Harvard’ yields (5%) has remained steady for the past few years. Furthermore, I was very fortunate to be a Harvard-Stanford cross admit for the class of 2017, and we had a FB group for only those cross-admits. Now, not everyone joined, but I can tell you that out of the 100+ people who joined, many of them are even computer science-oriented people, more than 70% chose Harvard over Stanford. Some even applied SCEA for Stanford but ended up choosing Harvard.</p>
<p>Of course, this, is again, not indicative of anything. I’m sure the almost 30% who chose Stanford over Harvard had very excellent reasons for doing so, and I can see why someone would make that decision. But I would never say that this means Harvard is better than Stanford or more desirable or exclusive. </p>
<p>All in all though, I do agree with your advice to OP that he would be smart to apply for a wide range of schools.</p>
<p>The admission rate, as many should know, is solely based on how many apply and how many are accepted. Most of the “selective” schools tend to accept similar numbers of students, but some bring in more students in the applicant pool. Of course the school with the most applicants will have the lower admission rate (given that the schools it is being compared to has a similar number of admits).</p>
<p>Point is, both are selective schools, but if you focus on the statistics behind the numbers, UChicago tends to accept more students. Therefore, UChicago might be a tad bit lees selective (IMO).</p>