Is Princeton harder to get into than UC Berkeley for undergraduate admissions?

The biggest practical tradeoff is that Princeton admits a much smaller freshman class through a highly selective private-university process, while UC Berkeley admits a larger and more varied pool, with selectivity that can shift a lot by college, major, and California residency. In straightforward overall admissions difficulty, Princeton is harder to get into. Berkeley is extremely competitive too, but its admissions landscape is less uniform because some paths into the university are noticeably tougher than others.

Princeton is one of the most selective undergraduate institutions in the country, and there is no version of Princeton admissions that is “easier” by major in the way applicants often think about Berkeley. UC Berkeley, by contrast, has very high demand across the board, but the level of difficulty can depend heavily on whether you are applying to something like engineering, computer science, business-related pathways, or a less impacted area. In-state and out-of-state applicants can also experience Berkeley differently.

That is why people give mixed answers. If someone is talking about Berkeley’s most competitive colleges or majors, they may describe it as brutally hard, and they are not wrong. But if the question is the overall undergraduate admissions bar for the university as a whole, Princeton is the tougher admit.

So the clean answer is yes: Princeton is harder to get into overall than UC Berkeley for undergraduate admission. Berkeley remains among the most competitive public universities in the country, but Princeton sits in a smaller, more selective tier overall.