Is Cornell or Princeton harder to get into?

The biggest practical tradeoff is not really “hard” versus “easy” because both are reaches, but that Princeton is usually viewed as the more selective school overall, while Cornell’s selectivity varies more by college and major. Princeton has a smaller undergraduate population and a more uniformly ultra-selective applicant pool. Cornell is still extremely competitive, but its size and structure mean admission odds can differ meaningfully between places like Engineering, Arts and Sciences, CALS, or Hotel.

So yes, the common perception is accurate: Princeton is on another level in overall selectivity. If you are building a college list, it makes sense to treat Princeton as one of the hardest admits in the country. Cornell is also very hard to get into, just not typically discussed in quite the same category across the board.

One reason people talk about Cornell differently is that it is made up of multiple undergraduate colleges, and some are state-affiliated while others are privately endowed. That does not make Cornell “easy,” but it does make the admissions picture less uniform than Princeton’s. A student applying to Cornell Engineering is facing a different landscape from someone applying to the School of Industrial and Labor Relations or the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

For list planning, I would treat both as reaches, with Princeton as the more extreme reach. Cornell can still be a very high reach depending on your intended college or program, but it is not usually perceived as quite as prohibitive overall as Princeton. The more useful next step is to compare yourself to the specific Cornell college you would apply to, rather than thinking of Cornell as one single admissions category.