<p>By the way, Harvard, Yale and Princeton all had lower yields in the '70s, because the population of kids applying then was much more likely to see Dartmouth or Amherst or Swarthmore as a viable alternative, not to mention each other. (Stanford, not so much back then.) So they had less than a third the applicants, and accepted a bunch more kids.</p>
<p>Of course it was easier to get in back then, if you came from the “right” background, or even from the wrong background but you knew enough to apply. I was the best student at my small-city private school, and that meant I could choose where I wanted to go, period. HYP accepted eight people from my class of 110 (which was really 90, since it included 20 girls from a newly acquired girls’ school with totally different culture, and only 3 or 4 of them applied to any of the same colleges as the boys); maybe 15 people applied to one or more of them. I applied to two, and nowhere else. Absent an SCEA acceptance, no one would possibly do anything like that today.</p>
<p>guillaume – smaller colleges, and secondary and tertiary public colleges in the Northeast and Midwest, are dying. The huge growth in applications at elite colleges does, to some extent, reflect more multiple applications, but fundamentally it also reflects that a lot more strong students are applying to those colleges who in past decades would have been perfectly happy to go to their state’s flagship.</p>