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Please stop making pointless discussions about target schools, this forum gets clogged up with these and the actually useful posts get zero traction. There's 1000 other threads on both of these schools that you can read but I'll give you a quick TLDR.

Population size: Northwestern is smaller, Cornell is bigger

Location: Northwestern is in a suburb of Chicago, Cornell is in rural Ithaca

Placement: Both schools place lights out, literally dead even. Maybe Northwestern places better per capita but it doesn't matter since Cornell is double the number of undergrads.

Cost: Both are very expensive

Now have fun reading the hundreds of other threads that exist on these schools and make a decision. The placement is the exact same at all of the schools that fall into this bucket (Duke, Dartmouth, Northwestern, Cornell, Brown, Chicago) and you won't get access to opportunities that you wouldn't have at a peer institution.

 

Yeah so let me give you a more sincere response. It's ok to ask this question because now you get answers specifically targeted towards it. 

Cornell has a higher ED acceptance rate so if you are going purely off that metric, ED there. Both are amazing schools with their pros and cons. If you really like Northwestern better then ED there. But in my opinion, since both are equally good for placement, I say Cornell. The school seems more lively + more people + very cool campus + big finance focus + you could even study in CALS or Nolan instead of Dyson. While Chicago is an amazing place to be, the Cornell experience seems amazing (don't listen to people saying ohhh it's such a sad school or whatever). There are a wide range of people there and you might as well experience that because you will be living in a big city regardless if you want to do finance. 

 

Looking at the most recent Common Data Set Northwestern has a higher ED acceptance rate than Cornell. The overall acceptance rate is higher at Cornell.

 

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