I’ve been hearing that the major you choose could impact chances of getting into Carnegie Mellon. I am interested in Carnegie Mellon for a philosophy major, in large part because of their music program (though I’m not planning on majoring in music). I was wondering if anyone knows what the individual acceptance rates are for each school?
Also do you think I have a shot at getting in regular decision? To be brief: I am from a rural state, have unweighted 4.0, Full IB, State-level ECs, plenty of community service, no test scores (yet! hopefully).
Philosophy is in the Dietrich College (had to look that up - still H&SS to me) which, as the site noted above shows, is one of the “easier” schools for admission (easy being relative), at least as of 2019 (and historically)
But also note that the statistics of the 2020 class are substantially more selective than the 2019 class listed above:
It has been a long time, but I was in H&SS years ago (double major, BS Econ and BS PPM), and the engineering students were fond of reminding me that 1. it was far harder for them to win admission to CMU, and 2. their coursework was much more challenging than mine. And they were right.
If you go to Niche you can look up a university, then under “admissions” you can enter your GPA and SAT or ACT, and on a graph they will show you how you compare to last year’s class. US News also has this function, but on Niche you can enter a major and see how you compare to other students applying to the Philosophy program.
If you are admitted you will need to enroll in that program for the freshman year and request to transfer at the end of freshman year. Transfer into many programs is very competitive.