Cornell’s Dyson has just about the lowest acceptance rate I’ve ever seen at 3%. How is this even possible? It this because business at Cornell isn’t that big so they accept less students? I thought Dyson was less well known than bigger names like Wharton, Haas, and Ross.
Also does anyone know where I could find some data on the average SAT, ACT, GPA, etc of Dyson’s admitted students? Because according to an obscure website I found, their average SAT is 1450 and ACT is 33, which is somewhat on-par (if not lower) than Cornell’s general numbers, yet their acceptance rate is 3%?
Do you think the candidate pool for Dyson is just worse than CAS or Cornell engineering? I’m just trying to gauge its difficulty, but am having trouble finding more info online.
It’s low because of its small size. “Because the Dyson School offers one of the smallest, most selective 4-year undergraduate business program in the U.S., our students know each other.” There are only a total of 3,690 undergraduate students in CALS.
The AEM major in Dyson is ranked top 10 by Businessweek.
@musicalitty last year I believe something like 193 kids graduated from Dyson in business…so they only have roughly 200 kids each grade. That is not alot. Therefore, the acceptance rate is slim. @calsmom I think you counted the CALS, when in fact Dyson is both CALS and SC Johnson with a very very small part of that 3690.
@LvMyKids2 , I put the total number of CALS undergrad since Dyson is in both CALS and SC Johnson business school and to give @musicalitty an idea of the scale of difficulty to get into the AEM (applied economics management) major in the Dyson/CALS college. Plus, it is hard to find info on the acceptance rate into the major. So I agree LvMyKids, the total pool of undergrads in AEM major and in SC Johnson is very small chunk of the 3,690 in CALS.
My 2¢ to @musicalitty is to have a strong and proven level of interest as to why you want to go into business. For example, the SC Johnson school has the Hotel school so if you have work experience in hotel and hospitality and you want to apply to the business school for that reason I’d say you’d be a strong candidate (along with strong gpa, test scores, etc)
I have a friend that got into Dyson ED and my brother currently attends Cornell. Both of them told me that Dyson’s acceptance rate is so low because many of the recruited athletes are in Dyson so they have to save spots for them. I’m sure that’s not the only reason the acceptance rate is so low but it’s one of them
@ajuan317 that’s opposite from what my son told me. He’s recruited athlete and was advised that AEM in Dyson/CALS is difficult to get into and to choose another major. Not that he wanted to choose AEM at the time, but when he did his OV and discussed possible majors and colleges that’s what was told to him. Maybe the “held” spots are in the SC Johnson school? I think my son’s AI score was 210 so he wasn’t an athlete that had low numbers and couldn’t get into AEM, but I guess coaches want to be sure athletes get their LL. I guess it’s all speculation.
@LvMyKids2 re post #4, you’re right I didn’t make sense in that post. So I did some digging to try and find admit rate for Dyson and found some info:
From a 2017 article:
“The Dyson Cornell SC Johnson College of Business and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania are the only two undergrad business programs of all seven Ivy League schools. And they are the most selective schools in the United States, with only 7.1% of applicants gaining admission to Wharton and an astoundingly low 2.93% getting the nod from the gatekeepers at Cornell.
Lynn Wooten, dean of the Dyson School, has a simple explanation for why her school went from a still very low 7.0% acceptance rate in 2016 to its sub-3% mark this fall, when only 128 were admitted out of 4,366 applicants: the Dyson School’s profile rose considerably after merging last year with Cornell’s Hotel School and Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management…”
If applying for Dyson AEM, students apply to CALS even though Dyson is in SC Johnson College of Business.
If applying for Hotel Administration, students apply to SHA even though it’s also in SC Johnson College of Business. Applications are evaluated by a SHA committee separate from CALS admissions.
@musicalitty I hope this answers your question better!
@musicalitty I would let the numbers do the talking
Anyway, AEM is in CALS (it began there) but then it merged with two other schools in Cornell to make the SC Johnson College of Business, so it’s also in that College. I know, it’s confusing. https://admissions.cals.cornell.edu/academics/majors Applicants must list down the specific major so I think if you’re not accepted into AEM, you’re not going to Cornell.
“Because of the Dyson School’s unique location in Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), one of the world’s leading land-grant colleges, students can easily combine their AEM major with a focus or double major in the life sciences, environmental sciences, agricultural sciences, or applied social sciences.”
@calsmom thanks for the info! I think it is VERY confusing and I am still somewhat confused after sitting through an admissions information session specifically for the business school. I think over time something will change, as it is confusing and IMO they need more than approx 190 kids in business at a school that size. I think Wharton is a school that is more competitive and definitely more widely known and maybe more prestigious. I think one knows immediately Wharton but not necessarily Dyson or SC Johnson or whatever one uses to say they are in business at Cornell.
@LvMyKids2 the merge is very recent (2016/2017) and they have a new dean from Univ of Michigan Ross so maybe the branding will get better as time goes on. The Dyson School is 800 large.
Here’s a link to the entire article. Disappointed that the writer listed Ivy League schools as having seven not eight. https://poetsandquantsforundergrads.com/school-profile/cornell-universitys-dyson-school/
How many athletes could be applying to Dyson ? My brother was a recruited athlete at another school and they highly “suggested” not applying to their business school due to the amount of time an athlete is training on a daily basis ( he trained 2 hours in the am and 3 hrs in the afternoon and he was only a swimmer) plus the amount of time traveling to other schools for competitions. I’m not sure that information is correct but I could be wrong. It just seems as though there are so few spots to begin with ya know?
The notion that recruited athletes are steered towards Dyson is a myth. The class size of Dyson is made up a good cross section of student backgrounds. Yes, some are recruited athletes but not disproportionate to any other School within Cornell. With that said, Dyson is highly selective in the type of student it accepts. Not only from a stats perspective, but also from the view of how successful will an accepted student be in a business environment. For Dyson outcome is as important as stats. That’s why most Dyson students on paper look remarkable similar in terms of being very high achievers who also share a singular passion for a career in business. Whatever that field of business may be, of course.
@danakaplan you can transfer to Dyson, it’s possible and they give a link to explain the process on the school’s page. As for your brother I would have to agree that’s kind of how coaches present the AEM major to athletes. It’s suggested but they’re not going to stop a student from studying what they want to. But other other hand, coaches want their athletes to succeed. My son’s sport commitment sounds very similar to your brother’s. He has teammates that are engineering majors and it’s tough on them because they have a lot of labs.
I’m thinking the comment upthread about ‘saving spots’ might be referring to the Hotel school. I’m not even sure that comment has truth to it. SHA is not as rigorous as Dyson AEM major. I also think IRL is a popular school choice for athletes.
My son looked into possibly transferring into AEM but he would have had to play catch up on some courses which he didn’t want to do. Plus it’s hard transferring just as it is for freshman applicants.
Dyson accepted 128 students last year and 93 enrolled. I can no longer find the page where Dyson used to list the # of internal and external transfers, but IIRC, it was close to 50-50 split between internal and external. The class size doubled after freshman year. I do not know if this info is still true, other than last year’s admit stats.
I think some of the image of Dyson as a school for recruited athletes may be a holdover from the days of the old AgEc major, when CALS was called the Ag school, and yes, there were quite a few recruits there.
I think recruits are discouraged from the Engineering and science majors because of the difficulty of scheduling labs in addition to afternoon practices. However, there are recruited athletes in every major and every college at Cornell, as @spemmar1 said above. (Well, not sure about Architecture as those students spend a lot of hours in studio.)
As to a coach steering a student to one college or another, some of that may be timing. If a small program (like Dyson, SHA, or ILR) has already ‘offered’ spots to a # of recruits, the later recruit may be directed to another program that has not filled all of its slots.
@danakaplan take this with a grain of salt since i’m just another dyson hopeful, but i heard its VERY difficult to transfer into Dyson because there are so few spots to begin with and not a lot of kids transfer out once they’re in. it’s sort of like wharton, where its extremely hard to get in if you aren’t accepted into the particular school
