For the top colleges, which one is relatively easier to get into?

golacs
Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:14:19 +0000

How do you think the average or overall difficulty of being accepted into the top colleges? Please exclude the special schools (such as Army, Navy, Olin etc…), the special cases (such as student A was accepted at Harvard but rejected at Tufts, etc…) and the school’s specialties (such as CS major at Carnegie). Below is my list from the hardest to relatively easier:

Tier 1 – Super Hard
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT

Tier 2 – a little bit easier than tier 1
Amherst, Brown, Caltech, Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke, U Penn, Swarthmore, Williams

Tier 3 – a little bit easier than tier 2
Bowdoin, Chicago, Cornell, Georgetown, Harvey Mudd, Johns Hopkins, Middlebury, Northwestern, Pomona, Rice, Washington in St Louis

Tier 4 – a little bit easier than tier 3
Berkeley, Claremont McKenna, Carleton, Davidson, Haverford, Notre Dame, Tufts, UCLA, UVA, Vassar, W&L, Wellesley, Wesleyan

Tier 5 – a little bit easier than tier 4, but still very hard
Bates, Carnegie Mellon, Colby, Colgate, Emory, Michigan, Oberlin, Smith, UNC, USC, Vanderbilt, Wake Forest

I use tiers because I would think that the differences within the same tier are ignorable. For example, on average, Getting into Amherst would be as difficult as getting into Duke.