Is it harder to get into MIT or Carnegie Mellon for undergraduate admissions?

The biggest practical tradeoff is that MIT is more uniformly ultra-selective across the entire undergraduate applicant pool, while Carnegie Mellon’s difficulty can swing more by college or major, especially for School of Computer Science and some engineering programs. For a student looking at engineering or computer science, both are very hard admits, but MIT is typically viewed as the tougher overall undergraduate admit. Carnegie Mellon can feel just as difficult in its most sought-after programs, particularly computer science, where admission is often exceptionally tight and more major-sensitive.

MIT admits students to the institute rather than to a narrow undergraduate major in the same way some universities do, and its applicant pool is packed with top students in math, science, and engineering. That makes the baseline level of competition intense for everyone applying. CMU, by contrast, has different undergraduate colleges with noticeably different levels of selectivity, so the answer changes depending on whether you mean SCS, engineering, or another division.

For your interests, the clearest way to think about it is this: MIT is usually harder to get into in the broad, overall sense. Carnegie Mellon computer science is one of the few places where the difficulty can approach that same level in practice, and for some applicants it may feel nearly as tough or occasionally tougher because you are applying into such a specific, heavily subscribed program. CMU engineering is also highly selective, just not usually described as quite as universally difficult as MIT.