Is University of Washington harder to get into than Carnegie Mellon?

The biggest practical tradeoff is that Carnegie Mellon is more uniformly selective across its applicant pool, while the University of Washington can feel very different depending on whether you are in-state, out-of-state, and which major you want. For a typical applicant looking at overall admissions difficulty, Carnegie Mellon is harder to get into. UW is a strong public flagship with some extremely competitive direct-admit pathways, but CMU is usually the more difficult admit in the broad sense.

A lot of the confusion comes from major-specific admissions. At UW, some programs such as computer science, engineering, and business can be much tougher than the university overall, especially if you are applying from out of state. That means a student targeting one of those direct-admit programs may experience UW as very selective even if the overall university is less difficult to enter than CMU.

At Carnegie Mellon, selectivity is high across the university, and several colleges there, especially computer science, engineering, design, and drama, are especially difficult. Even outside those headline programs, CMU tends to draw a very strong national and international applicant pool, so the baseline level of competition is usually higher than at UW.

So if you want the simple comparison for an average applicant, Carnegie Mellon is the tougher admit. The main exception is when you are comparing CMU to one of UW’s most capacity-constrained majors, where UW can become comparably hard, and in some cases feel harder, because getting into the university is not the same as getting into the program you actually want.