<p>I was looking at the electronic edition of the 2010 USN&WR Best Colleges ranking and it mentions CMU's acceptance rate as being 37.9 %. However, according to CMU's admissions website, the correct figure should be 27.4 %. Either US News got it wrong or CMU posted the wrong numbers. Please clarify.</p>
<p>I checked CMU’s [Common Data Set](<a href=“http://www.cmu.edu/ira/CDS/pdf/cds_2008_09/cds2008_2009_part_c.pdf”>http://www.cmu.edu/ira/CDS/pdf/cds_2008_09/cds2008_2009_part_c.pdf</a>) page and the USN&WR acceptance rate seems to match it. The problem is the Common Data Set registers only 13,527 applicants in the fall of 2008 whereas, according to CMU’s admission statistics page, that number should be over 23,000. </p>
<p>Unless I’m missing something, it looks like someone (probably in the admissions office) really screwed up this time, and that may have significantly hurt CMU’s ranking in the USN&WR list.</p>
<p>Also on the CollegeBoard website it says Carnegie Mellon’s admit rate is 38%. I feel like that’s not really the admit rate.</p>
<p>I believe that the difference is that this page:</p>
<p>[Admission</a> > Admission Statistics](<a href=“Home - Computing Services - Office of the CIO - Carnegie Mellon University”>Home - Computing Services - Office of the CIO - Carnegie Mellon University)</p>
<p>is showing admittance by school, not overall. You can’t total it up. So if a student applied to three colleges and was only admitted to one, it’s 100% admittance for that student, but only 33.33% for the colleges. Apparently 38% of applicants were admitted somewhere.</p>
<p>If someone applies to, let’s say two colleges within CMU, is that counted as a single application or as two separate applications for the purpose of computing the global admit rate ? </p>
<p>It makes sense that the difference between the 23,000 applications in the admissions page and the 13,527 applications in the Common Data Set may be due to double-counting of that sort.</p>
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<p>That number is ovER 9000!!!</p>
<p>Sorry, had to do it.</p>