How about this article from Stanford’s website? Apparently the admission rate for the class of 2013 was the most competitive ever. They received 30,428 applications, a 20% increase over their anticipated number, and only accepted 2,300 of them, a 7.6% acceptance rate, their lowest acceptance rate ever.
Brown and Yale had even lower acceptance rates according to the counselor at my school: hovering around the 5.5% mark.
Heck, she shared that one of our valedictorians (she didn’t say which one), whose own father was a Brown alumni, didn’t get in to Brown, but just two years ago she would likely have gotten in with her eyes closed.
The whole college admissions pool gets more competitive every year, and this year it has apparently reached the point of insanity. All privates are much harder to get into, and as such, more and more students are opting to go for the UC and CSU schools. But at the same time as UCs and CSUs are feeling increased application demands, they’re also facing significant budget cuts because California is broke and screwed, and as such, those schools are also turning away many students that could have easily gotten in just two years ago. My counselor is already starting to write appeal letters for students who were denied to some UC schools; something that hasn’t really had to happen much before.
So, if I had been a part of the class of 2007 and applied to the same ten schools, I probably would have had more than four acceptances. I should probably be glad that I’ve been accepted to the four places that I have to choose from. As for Brown, Stanford, Yale, and the like, I have absolutely no disappointment now for not getting into them. So I’m not a part of the top 6% of students in the country. That doesn’t bug me one bit.
