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<p>For the most part, some things never change. People will always keep dying for these schools. :)</p>
<p>Gellino-- I am refering to 1980 not 1996. What was the Harvard vs. Penn acceptance rate is 1980 vs. Today-- that was the topic.</p>
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<p>You were claiming that Harvard vs Penn back then was a similar spread to what it is today, implying it was constant throughout the time period and I was pointing out that in a time period much more recent than 1980 that the spread was much more disparate than what it is today.</p>
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<p>I knew it was one of the mid-'90s years. That’s pretty impressive that Penn has all that stuff on their website. Can non-alums access that stuff? Do other schools have that kind of historical info accessible?</p>
<p>gellino, my friend, have at it!</p>
<p>[UPA</a> 1 Trustees Records, University of Pennsylvania Archives](<a href=“http://www.archives.upenn.edu/faids/upa/upa1/upa1.html]UPA”>http://www.archives.upenn.edu/faids/upa/upa1/upa1.html)</p>
<p>It ain’t easy having a school of 10,000 undergrads to fill. Given that, it’s amazing that Penn has gotten the acceptance rate as low as it has.</p>
<p>Still, I demand lower ;)</p>
<p>^I generally have a problem when schools’ primary goal is to callously reject more students; not that it stops many from this pursuit.</p>
<p>Rejecting students is an ancillary effect of seeking out the most qualified student body possible.</p>
<p>Yes, but excitably putting out a press release the morning of April 1 announcing that you rejected 93% of candidates this year vs 92% last year before some applicants may have even heard the results seems unnecessary and insincere to me. When schools talk of their class, they usually start with the acceptance rate as opposed to quality of student profile.</p>
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<p>True but several top schools could have expanded (back before they became landlocked) and could have done so without lowering standards by any standard. This allows alums to boast that they have more high school valedictorians applicants than they can accept. If they had significantly expanded, alums would have absolutely freaked. Not much different than being in an exclusive country club in that regard.</p>
<p>The landscape will keep changing over time. Back in the 60’s Brown was the back-up Ivy.</p>
<p>And it shall be there again…MUAHAHAHHAHA</p>
<p>Well, who knows really…time will tell.</p>
<p>Brown became the hot school in the 1980s.</p>
<p>And now is hotter still. Yes, it is environmentally friendly, has a lot of rich international students and has a unique major designing program. Such cool :)</p>
<p>And Rhode Island School of Design is right next door. Providence is a great town… it’s run by the mafia but they do an excellent job!</p>
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<p>So all schools should be large schools?</p>
<p>Selectivity and this ranking stuff is a relatively new phenomenon in the 250 year history of a place like Brown (which wasn’t really even a “national” university until the latter half of the 20th century).</p>
<p>For me, Brown’s fit is very closely tied to its size and not its exclusivity (to an extent).</p>
<p>Which schools, if any, have significantly expanded in the past thirty years?</p>
<p>In the last 10 years we’ve added 400 more graduate students and 60 more medical students (an increase of ~30% and ~20%, respectively.</p>
<p>I believe Brown was about 1200 students per class (as opposed to ~1500 now) back in the 80s.</p>
<p>Quite a few schools have become quite a bit larger, though the majority of size increase I believe happened in the 60s and early 70s when there was a boom in research funding from the federal government.</p>
<p>The expansion during the 60s and 70s must have also been in part due to baby boomers. I imagine there wasn’t much expansion during the 80s.</p>
<p>The Baby Boomers helped to increase the number of colleges, but really the colleges that already existed had the money to expand their faculty and absorb those additional people because of the research funding. Otherwise, there simply would not have been capacity to accommodate them and new colleges would be started as opposed to current ones getting larger.</p>