Ivies or Oxbridge: Which Unis are Harder to Get Into?

Ivies or Oxbridge: Which Unis are Harder to Get Into?

As our UK offer holders are awaiting their US college acceptances with bated breath, we often get asked, “Is it easier to get into an Ivy League University or Oxbridge?”  While there are a number of variables to be considered in addressing this question, including what course one applies to for their UK applications, the Ivies are, in general, far harder to gain admission to than Oxford or Cambridge University.  Not just that, even Ivy plus colleges and selective liberal arts colleges are generally harder to get into than their UK counterparts, such as the University of Chicago, UCLA, UC-Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Amherst College, and Pomona College.

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For example, our Cambridge applicants this year applied for courses that had offer rates (most people equate getting an offer with “getting in,” though its a given that UK universities require you to actually meet the said offer) that ranged from 16-28%.  I should note that there are far less selective courses available at Cambridge as well, but our students tend not to apply for those. 

Regular decision results for the Ivy League are not out yet, but for the sake of comparison, its useful to look at the case of UCLA. UCLA had a historic rise in the number of applications it received, and while their official statistics haven’t been released, based on the numbers released by the UCLA admissions office, we can estimate that the university’s overall undergraduate acceptance rate for this years applicants was around 16%. 16% !?!?!  Yes, and we expect UC Berkeley to have an acceptance rate that is somewhere south of that figure, but not by a lot.  So what do the the Ivy League's acceptance rates look like in regular decision?  We're talking single digits, some of which will fall below 5% this year. To put this into perspective, the only Oxbridge course with a single digit acceptance rate is Computer Science at Oxford, which none of our students have applied for to date (the techies seem to like the US). 

I should note that all of our Cambridge applicants applied to UCLA and were accepted. They all received offers from Cambridge as well.  What’s truly interesting is that UCLA was the harder school to get into for our students, even though most of them would argue that the Cambridge’s name has more cachet globally.  In fact, their UCLA acceptance could not be taken for granted this year.  

Two lessons to be learned from this: 1) prestige and overall reputation does not always translate into selectivity in international admissions and 2) even with Donald Trump in power, the United States remains the most selective international admissions jurisdiction in the world.  

That is precisely why its called March Madness! Regular decision Ivy League decisions are coming out next week so stay tuned (we already have a well-deserved Cornell offer) . . .