Duke or Yale?

CC_Admin
Wed, 12 Dec 2007 19:03:46 +0000

Kowloon - that’s not a conclusion I can draw; the admissions officers at schools are juggling extremely complex and subjective situations; one can come up with some measures of selectivity (admission rate, matric rate, etc.) but all of those are based on different input conditions (not all the same people are applying to the same place) and different admissions offices (not every school is looking for the same person). There simply isn’t a great answer for “what’s harder” when comparing schools of similar characteristics…

Purely based on the numbers and, basically, making a complete guess based on those numbers - Yale’s 9-ish percent acceptance rate is half of Duke’s 19-ish percent rate so from that point of view, Yale’s harder to get in to. I cannot imagine that the “international student with aid” differential is so great as to make Duke statistically less likely to get in to – but again, it mostly depends on what the admissions officers are looking for and how you fit into a particular class at each institution.