Is Notre Dame or UVA more selective?

Notre Dame is usually viewed as a bit more selective than UVA in the broad national sense. Both are highly competitive, but Notre Dame tends to draw from a very large national applicant pool for a smaller undergraduate population, while UVA’s selectivity can look different depending on whether you are in-state or out-of-state. That residency split matters a lot at UVA and makes simple one-to-one comparisons less clean.

For a student applying from anywhere in the country and trying to gauge prestige or admissions difficulty in a general way, Notre Dame is more often placed in the slightly tougher bucket. It has a more uniform applicant pool because it is a private university, whereas UVA, as a public flagship, has a mission that includes serving Virginia residents. In practice, that means UVA can be especially hard for out-of-state students, even if its overall selectivity is not always perceived as quite as tight as Notre Dame’s.

The kind of student who sees UVA as the more selective option is often an out-of-state applicant looking at a limited number of available seats for non-Virginians. For that student, UVA may feel every bit as hard, or in some cases harder, to crack. The kind of student who sees Notre Dame as more selective is usually looking at the national picture, where Notre Dame’s admissions reputation is slightly more restrictive overall.

So if your question is broad and not tied to one admissions cycle, Notre Dame usually gets the edge as the more selective school overall, while UVA can be just as intense, especially for out-of-state applicants.