Is Carnegie Mellon or Brown more selective for undergraduate admissions?

Brown is more selective overall for undergraduate admissions.

One important difference is consistency across majors. At Brown, admissions is very selective across the board, while Carnegie Mellon’s selectivity varies much more by school and program. CMU programs like computer science, engineering, design, and drama can be extraordinarily difficult to enter, and in some cases may be as hard as or harder than Brown for that specific major, but that is not true of every CMU division.

Carnegie Mellon is still extremely competitive, but it is more specialized in how that competitiveness shows up. Students applying to high-demand technical or arts programs at CMU often face a very tough admissions process, sometimes including portfolios or auditions depending on the school. So for an overall university-level comparison, Brown is the harder admit, while at the program level, some CMU majors can be every bit as selective.