Is Georgetown or U of Penn more selective?

College Search & Selection
1

<p>I always thought Georgetown was easier to get into, is this true? I'll apply to whatever is easier!</p>

<p>(I should also note that I'd be considered by CC an "all books and no extra curriculars" student, so whichever school is less holistic would favor me better)</p>

2

<p>Please read this and answer the questions below so that we can provide useful advice. :slight_smile:
<a href=“Before you ask which colleges to apply to, please consider - College Search & Selection - College Confidential Forums”>Before you ask which colleges to apply to, please consider - College Search & Selection - College Confidential Forums;

3

<p>Use websites like College Navigator to find this info and many other stats for any schools you may be interested in…</p>

<p>UPenn:</p>

<p><a href=“College Navigator - University of Pennsylvania”>College Navigator - University of Pennsylvania;

<p>Georgetown:</p>

<p><a href=“College Navigator - Georgetown University”>College Navigator - Georgetown University;

<p>UPenn admits 13% vs. Georgetown’s 18%</p>

<p>You can also compare SAT/ACT scores, tuition, financial aid, majors, etc.</p>

4

<p>@MYOS1634</p>

<p>This is a 100% objective question, no stats required…</p>

5

<p>Below you can find a detailed profile with stats on last year’s admitted students at Georgetown. It’s broken down by SAT, class rank, and specific school.</p>

<p><a href=“https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/wcwzfcswo59o21cw6b73”>https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/wcwzfcswo59o21cw6b73&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

6

<p>Georgetown and Penn admission outcomes vary by specific school. However, they both take “holistic” views of their applicants (as virtually all highly selective private schools do).</p>

7

<p>It’s not 100% objective since, I assume, the question pertains to yourself and is thus “which school would be easier for me to get into?” It depends on a lot so we need more info.</p>

8

<p>Without looking at detailed stats breakdowns, I’d expect the selectivity order to look about like this:</p>

<p>Penn Wharton > Penn SAS, Penn Engineering, GU SFS > GU CAS , GU Business </p>

<p>The OP can verify this by studying what throwaway1252 provided and similar numbers for Penn.
However, whatever the right order is, and even with very high stats, admission to the least selective of these programs would not be assured. </p>

9

<p>I agree for order of selectivity within each school, but as far as selectivity goes GU SFS > Penn Engineering for instance. And does OP have a strong STEM background or a strong language/social science background? What does OP hope to major in? Depending on OP’s profile, GU SFS would be unreachable while Penn SAS would be a crapshoot. :p</p>

10

<p>I want to major in Computer Science, and I have some solid STEM classes under my belt. </p>

11

<p>Georgetown’s CS offerings are rather biased toward data mining, information warfare, and similar topics that relate to government and political issues, while some other topics like theory, cryptography (oddly, given the emphasis otherwise), hardware, artificial intelligence (although may be touched on it the specialty topics that are emphasized), and compilers are less well represented.
<a href=“http://courses.georgetown.edu/index.cfm?Action=List&ProgramID=16”>http://courses.georgetown.edu/index.cfm?Action=List&ProgramID=16&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>If that is your intended emphasis in CS, Georgetown may be a good fit, but if you are looking for a more generalized CS department, Georgetown may not be that good a fit.</p>

<p>Penn’s CS offerings appear to be more generalized:
<a href=“http://www.cis.upenn.edu/ugrad/all-courses.shtml”>All Degree Requirements;

<p>Of course, you can find good CS departments at lots of schools which are less reachy than these two.</p>

12

<p>Georgetown is not a particularly good choice for Computer Science. Many less selective colleges, including Public State Universities are better. In any case Penn is significantly more selective than Georgetown.</p>

13

<p>

</p>

<p>Some CS or CS-related courses may be listed under other department headings.
Georgetown’s linguistics department offers courses in Natural Language Processing, Statistical NLP, Computational Corpus Linguistics, Machine Translation, Information Extraction & Retrieval, Computational Phonology, and Computational Grammar Formalisms.
<a href=“ExploreGeorgetown”>ExploreGeorgetown;

<p>(However, Penn is strong in the same area. <a href=“Computational Linguistics”>Computational Linguistics)</p>

14

<p>Upenn is more selective than Georgetown. However there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the two. Upenn admits 12.6% of the applicants while GT admits 17%. This is the overall picture; their programs and schools may be more or less selective. For example, I am sure GT’s school of foreign affairs is more selective than Upenn’s international relations program. </p>