i am curious, cause i cant find statistics
It depends on which undergrad and which graduate program. For example, it’s definitely harder to get into a highly selective college than the grad program at the same school, for example, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc.
It depends on the course of study, the school etc.
@TiggerDad wow so its harder to enroll into ivies during on undergraduate program. seems weird, i always thought it was opposite…
@Derpthulu - Like everyone says, it depends on what you want to study. Michigan and Cal are ranked highly in almost every graduate program, so they will be very hard to get into. For engineering, graduate programs at Georgia Tech, Illinois, Cal, Michigan and Purdue are higher ranked than any Ivy. Michigan State is the highest ranked graduate program in nuclear physics; Yale is the only Ivy in the top ten.
I’m not sure if is “harder,” but it is for sure more unpredictable.
Specially for PhD program, it is more like a job application. It depends not only on the candidate’s skills and abilities, but also on the match with the program, the availability of advisors, the availability of fund…
For my D, application to undergrad was “harder.” She was admitted to 3 schools out of 10 applications for undergrad, and 5/10 for grad (PhD).
Different animal from undergrad since the applicant pool is very specialized and motivated. So a 50% acceptance rate into a program does not mean anyone has a coin toss chance. It means that 50% of (say) applicants with outstanding undergrad work in French literature and Critical Studies and a particular aptitude to do meaningful research (as vouched by prof’s’ LORs) as well as a compelling personal statement tying this all up - stand a chance of being accepted into the French lit department or program.
@snarlatron btw i always wanted to ask this. Lets say you have bachelor in Business Administration, if you wanna apply for Computer Science, will you have harder time to get admitted?
Yes, if not impossible. Graduate study isn’t like undergraduate study where you learn about a field (your major) from the ground up, starting with the fundamentals, even if you’ve had no previous exposure to the topic in high school. Graduate study is for specialization. It builds upon the foundations laid by undergraduate study. Without a strong technical background in computer science, math, or engineering, as well as research experience (for a PhD or a thesis MS), an applicant would not be admitted to a computer science graduate program.
@AuraObscura i want to do bachelors in business adminstration and masters in artificial intelligence, so my chance to get in should be low right, if i dont do anything artifical intelligence related.
@Derpthulu - You could do it the other way around. Get your BS in something AI related and then get an MBA. At most you would need a few extra classes and some work experience. Law School would be another option with an engineering degree. There are typically no required classes. Even medical school could be done with likely an extra year of classes.
@Derpthulu Why? What is your ultimate goal? And your chance to get in wouldn’t just be “low”, it would be zero. Again, graduate admission isn’t like undergraduate admission. It is significantly more holistic and focuses on the individual. If you don’t have the background necessary for a graduate program, you simply won’t be admitted–it’s not about probabilities at that level. The people reviewing applications for a graduate program are generally actual faculty members and staff of the department you’re applying to, not a generalized admissions committee, and they evaluate applicants to determine whether they’ll be able to complete the program based on their own expertise.
@AuraObscura i have another question 
what about liberal arts graduates? do they have problem ij graduate admissions?
You appear to be “grasping at straws”.
You go to undergrad and study something that you like, or have an interest in doing, then, you apply to a grad school to complete and expand on that undergrad area.
If you try to do two completely different majors, you will most likely be denied at the grad school.
Liberal arts graduates or liberal arts college graduates?
You need a strong undergraduate background in the field you want to study at the graduate level., OR in a closely related field So, if you want to study AI at the graduate level, you need to major in CS or math. You can double major in CS and business, but your business background will not help you with graduate school in AI. However, you can apply to Law School or an MBA with any major provided you have a very high GPA.
I wouldn’t necessarily agree with this. It depends on the definition of “harder.”
The acceptance rates for certain graduate programs at top schools might be higher, on face, than the acceptance rates at the undergrad level. For example, the acceptance rate to Harvard may be 6-7% whereas the acceptance rate for a specific doctoral program may be 10% or even 15%.
But that’s because many graduate programs are pretty self-selecting, as snarlatron said. Undergrad students weed themselves out better than high school students. Lots of high school students are encouraged to apply by these schools (or other adults or peers) knowing or suspecting they have no chance of admission. By contrast, a lot of college students have a good idea that they are or aren’t competitive for certain PhD programs or other graduate programs and refrain from applying. That doesn’t mean it’s not harder to get the kind of profile you need to be competitive for those programs.
And in some cases, they’re just as hard or harder. Stanford’s PhD program in economics has about a 5% acceptance rates. Harvard’s is also about 4% (30 admitted students out of 700 applications.)
Actually, the better counterexample might be the Harvard Ed.M. program which has a 53% (!) admit rate. Indeed, generally speaking, Education Master’s programs are characterised by remarkably high admissions rates: Columbia has a 57% admit rate.
I agree that self-selection explains some of the difference. Nevertheless, I suspect that even after correcting for such self-selection, a difference in difficulty would still exist, from the standpoint of ‘tail-end risk’. You can be the valedictorian of your high school, crush your SAT/ACT, boast an impressive phalanx of EC’s, yet still be rejected by all of the top 10-15 undergraduate programs. But if you’re a reasonably strong education candidate, you’ll almost certainly be admitted to at least 1 of the 10-15 Master of Education programs. {The key difference seems to be that nobody really ‘needs’ a Master of Education - one can have a perfectly solid career in education without it. In contrast, nowadays, unless you’re an entertainer or an entrepreneur, you basically need a bachelor’s degree if you want a decent job.}
Hmm, I actually think the archetypal “perfect valedictorian with great ECs and SATs who is rejected by all the top schools” is actually a myth. I mean, I’m sure there are anecdotes about that type of student who was rejected from a variety of top places, but a student who is really that fabulous is probably likely to get in somewhere good if they really do apply to a spread of the top 10-15 universities.
On the flip side, I can definitely say that in some fields it isn’t uncommon for great candidates to get rejected everywhere for one or even two cycles. Clinical psychology, for example, is like that. I have some friends from college who were initially rejected everywhere they applied despite having good grades and lots of research experience under their belt. After working in a lab for a year or two they were accepted on the second or third go-round.
I think the answer is that it’s really field-dependent. For example, in public health I would say for sure than an outstanding student who applies to the top 10 MPH programs will probably get into at least one and maybe two or three, but that’s because the acceptance rates for these programs range from 33% to 67%+. But for a field like clinical or social psychology, even a student who applies to a range of 10-15 doctoral programs may get shut out.
I actually happen to know several. Granted - spoiler alert - one big problem (indeed, perhaps THE major problem) for them is that, well, they’re Asian. Whether right or wrong, it’s an undeniable fact that Asians are highly disfavored in the admissions process.
To be fair, they’re still attending strong schools. Just not the very top.
That’s my point exactly. If we consider undergrad to be a ‘field’ - admittedly a slight stretch of the lingo - then undergrad is almost certainly not the easiest field in which to be admitted into a top program. To be sure, it’s not the most difficult field either. Rather, it’s somewhere in the middle. The upshot is that there are indeed plenty of graduate students at schools like HYPSM who would never have been admitted into the undergrad program of those schools.
Another data point to back up the claim that “it is not necessarily harder, but it is more predictable.”
The number of undergrad admissions of a school changes very little from year to year. But that is not the case with grad admission.
The group that my D belongs to at her PhD school last year admitted 8 candidates, none of them decided to attend. This year, the same group admitted 15 candidates, 9 of them decided to attend.
There is no way to know ahead of time, and there is nothing the candidate can do about this.