Is Northeastern or UMass Amherst harder to get into?

Northeastern is harder to get into than UMass Amherst. In broad admissions terms, Northeastern is viewed as the more selective school, partly because it draws a very large national and international applicant pool and has become especially popular for programs tied to co-op, business, computer science, and pre-professional fields. UMass Amherst is well regarded and can be quite competitive for certain majors, but overall it is not as selective as Northeastern.

One concrete difference is the applicant pool each school attracts. Northeastern gets heavy interest from students across the country who are specifically looking for an urban Boston campus and a built-in co-op model, so the volume and concentration of applicants tends to push selectivity higher. UMass Amherst has strong reach, especially in the Northeast, but its applicant base is broader in a way that usually makes overall admission somewhat less restrictive.

Another difference is how competitiveness varies by program. At UMass Amherst, majors like computer science, engineering, and nursing can be significantly tougher than the university as a whole, so some applicants may find those paths very selective. Northeastern also has especially competitive programs, but the school itself is selective enough that the baseline level of difficulty is usually higher across the board.

A practical way to think about it is that getting into UMass Amherst is more attainable for many solid applicants, while Northeastern more often falls into the reach category unless a student has a particularly strong academic and extracurricular profile.