Is Tufts or Harvard harder to get into overall?

Harvard is harder to get into overall. It draws one of the deepest applicant pools in the country, has extraordinarily limited room in each class, and can reject many applicants who already have near-perfect grades, top scores, and exceptional extracurriculars.

One concrete difference is the level of academic and extracurricular distinction typically needed to be truly competitive. At Harvard, strong academics are just the baseline, and many applicants also bring national or international recognition, unusually high-impact leadership, or rare intellectual achievement. Tufts is also highly selective, but its bar for standing out is not usually at that same extreme level across the entire pool.

Another difference is how each school is discussed in admissions because of yield and applicant behavior. Tufts is famous for attracting many strong applicants and for caring about signs that a student genuinely wants to attend, which is why people sometimes talk about it as unpredictable. That can make Tufts feel tricky in individual cases, but unpredictability is not the same thing as being harder than Harvard overall.

A useful way to think about it is this: an applicant who is competitive for Tufts is not automatically competitive for Harvard, while an applicant who is genuinely competitive for Harvard would almost always also be in range academically for Tufts. So for a college list, treat Harvard as the more difficult admit and Tufts as still very competitive, but clearly a step less selective overall.