<p>Just wondering, I mean they're not the "best ranked" ivy.</p>
<p>What do you mean by “popular”?</p>
<p>I don’t think it is the most popular, it just has the most undergrads.</p>
<p>What kind of question is that?</p>
<p>yeah so many high school students apply to Cornell, because they think it’s the easiest ivy to get in or something.</p>
<p>^Very true, a lot of my friends say that about Cornell and Dartmouth. There’s really nothing about it being “popular.” I would probably say HYP are the most “popular.”</p>
<p>swiftjab: And then they get rejected because acceptance rates are very misleading. Universities like Cornell are too large to judge based on numbers. Keep in mind that a good portion of Cornell is a state school. The true “Ivy” portions of Cornell, if you want to say that, are the College of Arts and Science and the Engineering school. These are as difficult to get into as any other Ivy. To my knowledge, the state school parts are somewhat easier to get into.</p>
<p>If Cornell University attracts a lot of applicants, as a whole, beyond what one might expect, I imagine it’s because on the undergraduate level it consists of seven different colleges, with different missions and different programs of study. By contrast, many of the schools to which Cornell is compared are curricularly similar to only one or two of Cornell’s undergraduate colleges. Somewhat different applicant pools, in part, are attracted to each college.</p>
<p>Moreover, three of its colleges offer reduced tuition for New York State residents, this undoubtedly attracts applicants also.</p>
<p>FWIW, last time I looked the most selective, %-wise, of its undergraduate colleges was the College of Architecture.</p>
<p>Well, Cornell probably is the easiest Ivy to get into, in part because of its size. Not that that means a whole lot, because it is still difficult to get in. I’d say it’s popular in part because it’s a very good school, it has the Ivy cachet that some of its competitors (WashU, JHU, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon etc) lack, and it’s not as much of a “lottery” for which qualified but hookless students get in (unlike HYPS, Columbia etc) so it makes more sense to give it a shot.</p>
<p>It is misleading to say that Cornell is the easiest Ivy to get into. The College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Engineering are somewhere in the middle of the Ivy League in terms of selectivity (and these are the two “mainstream” colleges). The rest are specialty colleges which consider lower SAT scores and emphasize other admissions criteria. The specialty schools are nevertheless the best in the world in their respective disciplines.</p>
<p>I think Cornell receives the most applications for many reasons: beautiful campus, excellent academics, broad curriculum.</p>
<p>It has the highest acceptance rate of any ivy, approx. 21%. That is appealing to ivy hopefuls. That is why it appears to be more popular.</p>
<p>The acceptance rate in Cornell Arts and Sciences is less than 17%, not very different from Dartmouth and Brown.</p>
<p>
2013 Applications</p>
<h1>1 Cornell 34,381</h1>
<h1>2 Harvard 29,112</h1>
<h1>3 Yale 25,925</h1>
<h1>4 Brown 24,988</h1>
<h1>5 Columbia 24,428</h1>
<h1>6 Penn 22,939</h1>
<h1>7 Princeton 21,964</h1>
<h1>8 Dartmouth 18,130</h1>
<p>2013 Applications per Spot</p>
<h1>1 Yale 19.7:1</h1>
<h1>2 Columbia 18.2:1</h1>
<h1>3 Princeton 17.7:1</h1>
<h1>4 Harvard 17.6:1</h1>
<h1>5 Dartmouth 16.6:1</h1>
<h1>6 Brown 16.0:1</h1>
<h1>7 Cornell 10.8:1</h1>
<h1>8 Penn 9.38:1</h1>
<p>IBclass06-
You raise an interesting question. Do students decide whether to apply based on the number of spots? Are prospective applicants at Dartmouth discouraged from applying because there are only 1000 spots? I don’t think so. Why don’t 35,000 students apply to Dartmouth? or Penn, which also has a broad curriculum?</p>
<p>^ maybe less people favor smaller schools</p>
<p>Ummm…Dartmouth;s acceptance rate is 12%, much lower than Cornell and Penn. Dartmouth is much more selective than Cornell, like not even close.</p>
<p>
If Dartmouth had 7 colleges, they would. </p>
<p>Dartmouth consists of one undergraduate college that drew 18,130 applicants.</p>
<p>Cornell CAS drew 16,288 applicants. The other 6 colleges make up more than 50% of all Cornell applicants.</p>
<p>… that’s what I said…</p>
<p>what’s the acceptance rate for Cornell CAS?</p>
<p>collegehelp, the last cycle of admissions at Brown showed a 10.8% acceptance rate. It’s been a few years since it was around 17%.</p>