If you recently received a rejection from Cornell in the Early Decision round, you are not alone in that outcome, nor in the massive disappoint you are probably feeling. Cornell has had an overall acceptance rate just under 9% for the past two admissions cycles, with the acceptance rate staying somewhere under 10% for 5 years. The Early Decision acceptance rate, by comparison, has been about double the overall acceptance rate for that period of time.

We know – getting deferred from Cornell hurts. You spent months building an application that showed off your strengths, your passions, and why you belong in Ithaca. You hit submit hoping for a yes, and instead you got… not yet. And that can feel like rejection. But a deferral isn’t a no. It’s Cornell saying, “We’re still thinking about you.” You’re still in the running, and that means there’s still time to strengthen your application and remind them why you’re such a strong fit.

Cornell CALS is a unique school. One of eight undergraduate schools at the Ithaca, NY-based Ivy League university, CALS stands for College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

Cornell is well-known as the most practical of the elite Ivy League schools. Yes, they have all the usual humanities and liberal arts majors that one expects at a top-tier well-rounded university, but where Cornell truly stands out is in their specialized programs. Many of their programs are singular at the Ivy League level. Agriculture and hospitality, for one, but also many programs that are hard to find at such an exceptional level for undergraduate students, like architecture, public policy, labor relations, and human ecology. The overall acceptance rate is 8.4%, but we’ll break that down further where the data is available in this post.