Rank by Difficulty of Admissions

College Search & Selection
1

<p>MIT (13%)
Stanford (11%)
UC Berkeley (24%)
Cornell (25%)
Carnegie Mellon (34%)
Johns Hopkins (27%)
Columbia (11%)</p>

<p>Schools are listed according to USNEWS mechanical engineering (intended major) rankings. Listed next to each school is the school's 2008 acceptance rate.</p>

<p>Please do not post a list ranked by prestige, and please do not re-arrange the list by acceptance rates. Acceptance rates aren't good indicators of difficulty of admissions because they don't reflect upon the selectivity of the applicant pool, the applicant's intended major, OOS (for UCB), etc.</p>

<p>Plain and simple: I want to know which schools are the hardest and easiest to get into for an OOS mechanical engineering major.</p>

2

<p>Hardest: MIT, Stanford
Harder: UCB, Cornell, JHU, Columbia
Hard: Carnegie Mellon</p>

<p>Finer distinctions, particularly in the second category, are harder to make.</p>

3

<p>Stanford
MIT
Columbia
Cornell
JHU
CMU</p>

<p>That's about how I'd put them. I don't know enough about UCB to place it in there. I know EECS is extremely selective but I'm not sure about mech.</p>

4

<p>^Agreed. (10char)</p>

5

<p>MIT does not admit by major, so that factor at least does not need to be considered.</p>

6

<p>Given the toughness of admissions at Columbia and it being the least prestigious in mechanical engineering, I'm thinking about removing it off my list.</p>

<p>Since the low acceptance rate at Columbia largely is from CC, does anyone know if SEAS is easier or harder to get into than CC?</p>

7

<p>Much easier.</p>

8

<p>Is it harder to get into Cornell or Columbia engineering? </p>

<p>My preference is Cornell over Columbia. If Cornell is easier to get into, I might just remove Columbia from my list. Or is such a distinction impossible to make? In that case, should I just apply to both?</p>

9

<p>"Given the toughness of admissions at Columbia and it being the least prestigious in mechanical engineering, I'm thinking about removing it off my list"
agree columbia seems very odd compared to the other schools.</p>

10

<p>I'd say: </p>

<p>1.MIT
2.Stanford</p>

<p>3.Columbia
4.UC Berkeley (OOS)</p>

<p>5.Cornell
6.JHU</p>

<p>7.Carnegie Mellon</p>

<p>I put the gaps to indicate a difference (small, not large) in the level of selectivity. They are all very hard of course, but this is the way I see it in how difficult admission to these schools are. Don't be deterred from applying to a school though because of its low acceptance rate.</p>