How do Tufts and Colgate compare in admissions difficulty in general?

The biggest practical tradeoff is that Tufts sits in the more nationally crowded applicant lane, while Colgate is also very selective but tends to draw from a somewhat narrower applicant pool. In broad terms, Tufts is usually considered a bit harder to get into than Colgate for a typical regular-decision applicant. Both schools reject many qualified students, but Tufts more often gets grouped with the more admissions-intense private universities in the Northeast.

Part of that comes from Tufts’ profile and reach. It attracts a very large volume of applicants across arts and sciences, engineering, and international relations, and it has strong name recognition in multiple academic areas. Colgate is highly selective too, but as a smaller liberal arts college, its applicant pool is shaped a little differently and is often slightly less overwhelming at the top end than Tufts’.

That said, the gap is not huge enough to treat one as easy and the other as impossible. For a strong applicant, both should still be viewed as reachy or at least highly competitive, depending on the rest of the list. Colgate can be especially tough for applicants who do not show a real interest in the liberal arts college environment, and Tufts can be tough in part because it gets so many academically strong applicants with polished applications.

So if the question is simply which is harder in general, the better shorthand is Tufts by a modest margin. I would place them in a similar selective tier overall, with Tufts usually carrying the slightly steeper admissions climb.