Is it harder to get accepted into Harvard or Oxbridge?

I’ve been wondering about this for a while,
Is it harder to get into Harvard or Oxbrigde, and why?

What are the offer (as opposed to acceptance) rates for each?

Note that offer rates for different courses at Oxbridge vary significantly, whereas that's not the case for US universities because you are admitted to the university not (generally) a specific course.

Also Oxbridge generally admit based entirely on academic ability, whereas for Harvard extracurriculars are very important too.

Hint: the answer is, it depends.

Reply 2

username4271948

If you’re Asian, definitely Harvard.

Reply 3

liverninthered

The offer rate at Harvard is lower

Reply 4

ikuyo

an application to harvard seems like such a drag just because of having to go above and beyond when it comes to extracurricular (which likely aren't even related to your course like doing track at HS even if you want to do med).

Reply 5

Doones

Original post by liverninthered

The offer rate at Harvard is lower

Offer rate... or acceptance rate? They are quite different.

Reply 6

artful_lounger

Universities Forum Helper

Harvard had a success rate of about 5% last year, compared to an average success rate (across all undergraduate courses including GEM) at Cambridge of 20% last year (I imagine Oxford is similar to Cambridge although I think they are one or two percentage points lower in success rate).

However as noted by Doonesbury, the way the admissions tutors/committee assess applicants are hugely different for each. They aren't that comparable, but in general Harvard is going to be "harder" and if you aren't able/likely to successfully apply to Oxbridge here it's extremely unlikely you'll get into Harvard, unless you have exceptional non-academic elements of your application that Oxbridge would otherwise ignore that Harvard might be keener on.

That said if you're an Olympic athlete or similar, you would probably prefer Stanford or Berkeley for having a high academic calibre, being highly selective, and also having strong athletic provisions. Otherwise your exceptional non-academic background would probably be due to creative/performing arts strengths and it's quite likely you would only be looking at one specifically for a particular programme (and not comparing them and thus any comparison of "difficulty" of admission is pointless), and quite possibly wouldn't actually be considering any of them anyway.

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