<p>Yale and Princeton are the only non technical colleges receiving over 14 applications per slot.</p>
<p>The PR top "20 Toughest Schools to Get Into" this year are:</p>
<p>1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2 Princeton University
3 California Institute of Technology
4 Yale University
5 Harvard College
6 University of Pennsylvania
7 Stanford University
8 Swarthmore College
9 Duke University
10 Columbia University - Columbia College
11 Georgetown University
12 Brown University
13 Pomona College
14 Amherst College
15 Dartmouth College
16 University of California-Berkeley
17 Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering
18 Harvey Mudd College
19 Emory University
20 University of Virginia</p>
<p>Top Tier institutions are very hard to get into because the best applicants in the country tend to apply to those schools, which makes competition fierce. These applicants tend to have the highest SAT scores and grade point averages. All of these applicants are applying for an extremely limited number of seats in a given class. For example, Harvard gets around 20,000 applicants more or less each year, and only accepts about 10%. With all this said, because most of the applicants are going to be qualified for a spot in the class academically, top schools look at other qualities in the applicant's application to get a better idea of who the applicant is, and what he or she can bring to the institution. So, great grades and high sat scores in and of themselves don't gain admission, which is why many "academic superstars" are rejected from top schools in huge numbers. I must say though that if you want to see how hard it is to get into a top school or to see how competitive it is, you should read college ranking guides, or even go onto schools' boards on this website, and see the stats of the applicants who are applying to these top schools just to get an idea.</p>