Is Cornell or Rice generally harder to get into?

There is no stable, across-the-board answer that Rice is harder than Cornell, or vice versa. Both are extremely selective, and an applicant’s relative odds depend more on the academic program, application round, and institutional priorities in that cycle than on the schools’ overall reputations. Cornell’s admissions process is especially college-specific, so selectivity can differ meaningfully among its undergraduate colleges.

Cornell is larger and offers several distinct colleges, but that does not make it an easier target: applicants are evaluated in the context of the Cornell college and intended field they choose, and some applicant pools are particularly intense.

For a high school senior, the practical takeaway is to treat both as high reaches rather than trying to assign a universal difficulty order. A student whose coursework, activities, and academic direction clearly match a particular Cornell college may have a more coherent case there; a student drawn to Rice’s smaller undergraduate environment and able to show a strong fit with its community may be especially compelling at Rice. Neither school should be viewed as a reliable fallback based solely on the fact that the other might appear marginally more selective in a given year.