Is the University of Washington or NYU harder to get into?

The biggest practical tradeoff is that NYU is selective across the institution in a way that tends to be tough for most applicants, while the University of Washington’s difficulty depends much more on whether you mean the university overall or a particular pathway. For general admission, NYU is typically viewed as harder to get into than UW. UW is a major public flagship with a broad in-state mission, and that usually makes overall admission less uniformly restrictive than a place like NYU, which draws a very large national and international applicant pool for a more limited undergraduate class size.

A lot of the confusion comes from how people talk about UW. Its overall admission is one thing, but some programs and direct-entry options there can be much more competitive than the university-wide admit process suggests. If you strip that away and compare schoolwide selectivity only, NYU usually comes out as the tougher admit.

Applicant mix also matters. NYU tends to attract a self-selecting pool of students aiming for highly selective private universities, and it evaluates applicants in a context where many have very strong academic records and polished extracurricular profiles. UW certainly gets many strong applicants too, especially from Washington residents, but as a public university it serves a broader range of students and priorities.

So for the question you asked, the cleaner answer is NYU. If someone says UW is harder, they are often thinking about a specific major, direct admission track, or out-of-state context rather than overall university admission.