Most schools won't tell you a major-specific acceptance rate at all -- our piece on why engineering admissions can be far more competitive than the university's headline number suggests covers several schools that simply don't publish one. University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering is a real exception: its own admissions page publishes exact Direct to Major (DTM) first-year admission statistics, three years running, broken out by residency -- genuine official numbers, not an outside estimate.
The actual numbers, three years running
| Cycle | WA Residents | Domestic Non-Residents | International |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 1,617 applied, 599 admitted (37%) | 3,916 applied, 181 admitted (5%) | 1,413 applied, 30 admitted (2%) |
| 2024 | 2,094 applied, 564 admitted (27%) | 4,961 applied, 46 admitted (1%) | 1,448 applied, 30 admitted (2%) |
| 2023 | 2,155 applied, 569 admitted (26%) | 5,059 applied, 83 admitted (2%) | 1,326 applied, 21 admitted (2%) |
Two things jump out. First, the gap by residency is enormous and consistent -- a Washington resident's odds have run 13 to 27 times higher than a domestic non-resident's in every one of the last three cycles, a direct result of UW being a public university with a state-funded mandate to prioritize in-state students. Second, the WA-resident rate jumped sharply in 2025 (26% to 27% to 37%), while non-resident and international rates stayed low and comparatively flat -- the number of admitted seats going to residents grew faster than the applicant pool did, while the non-resident pool kept growing against a much smaller number of available spots.
There's no minimum GPA -- UW says so directly
This is worth stating plainly because it cuts against how these programs usually get discussed: UW's own CSE admissions page states outright, "there is no minimum GPA to apply for DTM admission." The school uses a holistic review process, and its own materials note that "no GPA guarantees admission" -- meaning even a very strong GPA doesn't function as an automatic in, and there isn't a published cutoff number to target in the first place. Any specific GPA figure you see quoted elsewhere for UW CS admission is an outside estimate, not something UW has published.
Why direct-to-major matters more than UW's overall rate
If you only checked UW's university-wide acceptance rate, you'd have no idea any of this was true -- CS admission at UW isn't decided by the same process or pool as the rest of the university. This is the same structural pattern covered in our broader piece on why a school's engineering or CS program can be dramatically harder to get into than the university itself: a fixed number of faculty and lab capacity, divided among a specific, self-selected pool of applicants who all want that exact major, produces a real acceptance rate that has nothing to do with the headline number.
What this means for you
- Use the residency-specific number that actually applies to you -- a Washington resident and a non-resident are competing in effectively different pools with very different odds, not one shared applicant pool.
- Don't chase a "target GPA" for UW CS admission -- none exists. UW states directly that there's no minimum and that review is holistic; treat any specific GPA cutoff you find cited elsewhere as someone's unofficial guess.
- Check the trend, not just the latest year. The Washington-resident rate moved from 26% to 37% in three cycles -- a single year's number can undersell or oversell how competitive the program actually is right now.
- If CS specifically is your goal, this is a different admissions process than "getting into UW." Research the direct-to-major process on its own terms rather than assuming your overall UW odds carry over.