How selective are Carnegie Mellon and Princeton compared with each other?

Princeton is more selective overall than Carnegie Mellon, and for a high school college list, it makes sense to treat Princeton as the harder admit. Both schools are highly selective and attract very strong applicants, but Princeton sits in the very top tier of admissions difficulty across the country. Carnegie Mellon is also extremely hard to get into, especially in certain programs, but overall it is not as selective as Princeton.

The important nuance is that Carnegie Mellon can feel Princeton-level, or even tougher, in specific colleges. Its School of Computer Science, drama, and some engineering or design-related programs are famously intense in admissions because CMU admits by school or program and some of those spots are very limited. Princeton, by contrast, is extraordinarily selective across the board, even though students are not applying into narrow undergraduate schools in the same way.

For a student building a list, Princeton should be viewed as a very high reach for almost everyone. Carnegie Mellon is still a reach in many cases, but the level of reach depends much more on what you are applying for. Someone applying to CMU computer science should think of it as an ultra-reach, while someone applying to a less oversubscribed CMU program may see it as slightly more attainable than Princeton, though still far from predictable.