Is Purdue harder to get into than Boston College for undergraduate admissions?

The biggest practical tradeoff is that Purdue’s admit difficulty changes a lot by major, while Boston College is more uniformly selective across the university. For undergraduate admissions overall, Boston College is usually viewed as the more selective school in a broad, general sense. Purdue can still be very hard to enter for certain programs, especially engineering, computer science, and other high-demand majors, but BC tends to be tougher overall for the average applicant looking at the institution as a whole.

That difference is why people online give mixed answers. If someone is talking about Purdue Engineering or CS, they may describe Purdue as extremely difficult to get into, and that is true. But if the comparison is simply undergraduate admission to the university overall, Boston College is more often the harder admit.

Another reason the comparison gets messy is that the schools are looking for somewhat different things. Boston College is a private university with a more classically selective, holistic process and less room across the board. Purdue is a large public university, so selectivity can vary more by residency status, program capacity, and intended major.

For building your list, the cleanest way to think about it is this: treat Boston College as the more selective school overall, and treat Purdue as ranging from moderately selective to extremely selective depending on the major you choose. If you are applying to a capped Purdue major, especially in STEM, the gap can narrow a lot and in some cases Purdue may feel just as hard or harder in practice for that specific program.