I always thought Carnegie Mellon’s acceptance rate was in the 10-15% range, but apparently its 23.6%. I know it’s an amazing school, but I was kinda surprised to see the acceptance rate over 20%.
Please tell me this is an April Fools post…
I guess you feel confident about jumping out of an airplane wearing a parachute with a 23.6% high chance of opening.
My bad guys. I know 23.6% is an extremely competitive acceptance rate. My reason for my surprise is that a lot of my friends got into UCLA (which has a 17.3 % acceptance rate), but got rejected from Carnegie Mellon, which has a higher acceptance rate.
LOL. ACT 25/75 range: 30-34 (math 31-35) math SAT 700-800, which means that 25% of those submitting ACTs had an 800 or above. Slackers!
Congrats on all the acceptances! CMU is a great school should you choose to attend.
% accepted is a worthless way to evaluate the strength of the students at a college. Remember that the biggest fliter happens before the admissions process not as a result of it. A school with a lower acceptance rate can attract a large number of mediocre applicants while another school may have a higher acceptance rate but a much stronger applicant pool.
@yoyohi SCS was 5% last year, CFA was like 4%, IS was like 9%, CIT was like 17%, Tepper was 1like 18%, MCS was like 20%, and Dietrich was like 22%. You have to realize acceptance rate doesnt mean much because it depends on the context of the accepted students. CMU has like the 4th highest SAT scores on average of all universities (not that scores exactly reflect intelligence anyway). Percentages arent that direct.
The acceptance rate is obviously high because people can apply into multiple ‘schools’ within CMU. If students could only apply to one just like many of other colleges, the acceptance rate was I think at 15% last year.
Acceptance rate isn’t indicative of selectivity for self-selected schools like CMU. UC acceptance rates are massively deflated because many lower-tier applicants (UCR/UCM types) check all most or all of the 9 UC campuses on the UC application.
CMU applicants are very self selecting because they know that CMU is difficult, high stress environment. Students don’t just apply to CMU for fun. Applicants are serious students.
@much2learn are all majors there stressful?
As with most schools, I am sure it can vary significantly. I would try to investigate your specific major. At most schools pre-med, engineering, and hard sciences tend to be more stressful, and also disproportionately attract too students.
You may also as about how they monitor that. DD is in a very challenging major at another top school, and they ask students to submit hours spent on homework by course on a weekly basis.
I think that is good feedback for the administration to keep it under control.
CMU selects/rejects based on the school the student applied. SCS is only 5% . while architecture is 52%… http://admission.enrollment.cmu.edu/pages/undergraduate-admission-statistics
Is UCLA actually more selective than Carnegie Mellon Tepper 0_0?
@somerandomuser I would say no but they usually have different applicant pools.
If you are looking at overall acceptance rate it appears as if UCLA is more selective than CMU. However you have to understand how the gpa formula for the UC system works. The UC system only takes into account up to 4 AP classes and gives an extra point towards gpa for those 4 regardless of how many a student has taken. So students who take a less demanding course load may end up with a higher gpa than someone who takes a very challenging one. For example, my son who took 14 AP classes in high school was rejected from UCLA while people he knew that didn’t take that many were accepted. Schools like CMU look at how many AP classes were taken in high school and factor that into acceptance decisions (my son is a freshman at CMU). You also have to factor in how many applicants UCLA had this year. If I’m not mistaken it was the highest in the nation, somewhere around 100,000. The applicant pool is getting bigger, yet the school can’t admit more students so the acceptance rate is driven down.
In case you’re interested, Google updated the search result and now it is ~15%.
Check out the most recent acceptance rate by college. Dietrich is the only one over 20%. Engineering is the biggest school and it’s at 13%.
https://admission.enrollment.cmu.edu/pages/undergraduate-admission-statistics
2016’s overall acceptance rate was 14.2%. That is definitely not “kinda high.” That’s on par with schools like Cornell, Rice, UPenn, or Harvey Mudd.
Also, CMU’s unique admissions system accounts for its acceptance rate inflation. There’s also a self selecting bias with kids that apply to CMU, since it isn’t as well known as Ivy Leagues and it has a very nerdy reputation.