Computer science PhDs outside California

[cabby]

Hi,

I am thinking of computer science PhD programs to apply to. I am already applying to most schools in California. I want to select a few outside California also so I have more options. Because I would much rather stay in California, I really wouldn't go to another school unless it was a big name school, but I've noticed some schools barely take any students, for example, Yale takes like 8 CS PhDs a year. So I am trying to find how likely it is to get into each of these schools before I decide which out of state schools to apply to.

Does anyone have an idea of the admission rates/relative difficulty of getting into the following schools for computer science PhD? Please don't comment about Masters admissions.

Cornell

Harvard

UIUC

CMU

MIT

Princeton

WUSTL

University of Washington

Columbia

Rice

Brown

University of Pennsylvania

Thanks a lot!

[newms]

Does anyone have an idea of the admission rates/relative difficulty of getting into the following schools for computer science PhD?

That's an easy question to answer. It's hard - very hard. Washington accepted 7% of applicants for Fall 2010. I'm not sure of the exact statistics for the other places, but I know MIT had 2700 applicants last year and I can't imagine that they admitted more than 5% of them - probably half that. Cornell, UIUC, CMU, MIT, Princeton, UT Austin, University of Washington are all top 10 computer science schools and the admission rate wouldn't be much more than 5% for each of them. The other schools are top 20 programs and I would estimate that the admissions percentages for those schools are probably somewhere around 10%, maybe less in some cases.

Edited May 17, 2010 by newms

[cabby]

That's an easy question to answer. It's hard - very hard. Washington accepted 7% of applicants for Fall 2010. I'm not sure of the exact statistics for the other places, but I know MIT had 2700 applicants last year and I can't imagine that they admitted more than 5% of them - probably half that. Cornell, UIUC, CMU, MIT, Princeton, UT Austin, University of Washington are all top 10 computer science schools and the admission rate wouldn't be much more than 5% for each of them. The other schools are top 20 programs and I would estimate that the admissions percentages for those schools are probably somewhere around 10%, maybe less in some cases.

Thanks for the reply. So it basically sounds like the top 10 schools are about 5% acceptance rate, the top twenty are 10%. I was curious about how the numbers fall off after that, top 30, 40, etc.

Are there any good resources for getting these numbers?

Thanks a lot!!

[newms]

Some of the top 20 schools are a little more than 10% percent. I read somewhere that Michigan was just under 15%. Wisconsin (top 15) published their admission info and their acceptance rate for 2009 was 10.3% (http://www.grad.wisc...ofiles/229.html) One useful resource I've used is looking at the results posted on thegradcafe results page for the different programs. There's a lot of information there from people who have been in contact with the different schools, for example applicants to Iowa State posted the link to the Iowa State results page. Iowa State (ranked in the 60s by US News FWIW) accepted around 23% of applicants (http://www.cs.iastat...m/f10status.htm), so you can use that as a judge for where other schools ranked in that area might be.

[timuralp]

How did you come up with that list? What is your area of interest? I would think that should be the guiding factor... From glancing at it, I'd guess theory. Is that right?