@ricck1 GS is not an extension school; it’s a liberal arts college of Columbia that awards traditional BA degrees (not ALBs in Extension Studies like Harvard Extension). You may be getting confused with Columbia’s School of Continuing Education, which allows its students to audit classes, but does not award the BA.
Islmom, There are plenty of schools that don’t require specific experience in hospitality-but if you want to go to a school that is known internationally as the best school for hotel management, you are likely to experience competition from applicants with achievements in the area of hospitality. If you have no experience, you are likely to be rejected in favor of those who have experience. On the other hand, if you are interested in liberal arts, consistent and strong experience in liberal arts would help you to be more competitive for very competitive liberal arts schools. The point is that there is no way to order how competitive schools are in general because their differences go well beyond simply their selectivity. Different schools seek different types of students. A student could be accepted for Harvard but rejected for Hotel Management at Cornell. So fit is key. And there are plenty of 18 year olds with experience and know they are headed to a hotel management career. Others should apply to schools that are more geared to generalists who want a well rounded undergraduate liberal arts education.
@lzpare absolutely not. Cornell, Dartmouth and brown are less selective than penn when you factor in both sat and acceptance rate. Also penn has the nursing school which brings the acceptance rate a bit up (it is the best in the country and nursing students are prob as smart than the rest of penn students but it is very self-selecting) also penn has a bigger ugrad body than all of the ivies except for cornell. Also there are specific programs at penn that are more than or as selective as even Harvard. But selectivity is a hard concept to define. Do you take into account seats, gpa, acceptance rate, extracurricular activities? For example Penn is known to place less importance on sat’s than hyp and Columbia and more on legit extracurricular and leadership activities( like starting your own company, charity and what not, being president of this and that etc…)
Also penn is the fourth most preferred school in the Ivy League after hyp. ( according to the parchment rankings)
As a general breakdown between the four schools at penn,most wharton cross admits prefer penn to pretty much all ivies except Harvard, most engineering students would only choose princeton and maybe Harvard( just because of the Harvard name) over penn( Cornell not so much because even tho the eng school is better most/a lot of penn engineers are business minded and wanna do something other than engineering but want the engineering background. For nursing students penn is their first choice( number 1 nursing school in the country). For CAS, it largely depends on the major but as a general rule I would say most would only choose Harvard or Princeton, also prob Yale( but for Yale it depends on the field of study) in any significant numbers. Lastly, LSm, m&t, Bsn-wharton students choose these over any other ivy and huntsman prob too( but maybe hop wins over a few huntsman cross admits)
So as you see Penn places high in both selectivity and cross admit preference in the Ivy League.
I assumed by this question you didn’t count Cornell, Brown, or Dartmouth as Ivies…
Well I don’t blame you 
I’ve always heard peers say that UPenn is the least competitive amongst the ivies…
Even if that’s true, UPenn is still an ivy league school, so I would think it would still be competitive…
They must have been uninformed peers. 
The statistics simply don’t support that.
However, as you indicate, the Ivies are ALL quite selective and competitive.
Selectivity is influenced more by marketing than actual superiority of one school over another. Penn could drastically increase its selectivity by cutting the class size by 50% in any given year then, surprise, they are as selective as Princeton or Yale.
Or, if they can persuade thousands of more kids to apply, selectivity dramatically increases. As far as test scores being a marker for selectivity, simply accept all the applicants with the highest scores. Penn rejects some students with perfect and near pear perfect scores as do all the other Ivies. In fact, the best marker of selectivity probably is the number of students who look better on paper numerically that are rejected. That’s a true marker of selectivity.
For what it’s worth, Cornell engineering students can take a minor in Dyson (the business school) designed specifically for them, so what you said is false.
In addition, this thread is definetely going to get bias from the beginning - we’re in the Penn forum, people want to defend their alma mater, future home, current residence, etc. I’m sure if this was posted in the Cornell forum, people would fight these accusations, same with Dartmouth and Brown.
@Jamesjunkers “For what it’s worth, Cornell engineering students can take a minor in Dyson (the business school) designed specifically for them, so what you said is false.”
Well, it is true that Cornell engineering students can take a minor in Dyson. However, it is also true that Penn engineering students are a lot more likely to end up in careers in something other than engineering.
The facts are that there isn’t much of a substantive basis to claim that Penn is the least selective Ivy. I mean you can say that you heard that, but you could have heard that about any Ivy. I mean I have heard MIT students say that classes they took at Harvard were a complete joke. What does that mean? It is just one person’s opinion. Realistically, until you clearly define what exactly “selectivity” means, it is essentially a meaningless question.