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.

If you were waitlisted by Cornell, you aren’t alone. Cornell offers a wild number of applicants, 12% in 2023, a spot on the waitlist. Out of 8,282 students offered a spot on the waitlist in 2023, 6,166 accepted that offer. This is twice as many students as they expect to enroll in the first-year class. We can’t quite understand what the purpose is of having such a deep waitlist, but it is what Cornell has done for years. Ultimately, for Fall 2023, 362, or 5.9% of students on the waitlist were accepted.