<p>Fudgemaster chose for engineering.</p>
<p>lopo - admit rate is only half the story. Columbia’s admit rate is essentially equal to Princeton’s - but obviously Princeton gets the lion’s share of the cross-admits, by a large margin. Even Brown beats out Columbia for cross-admits, although it traditionally accepts over 2% more students. So obviously, the quality of the student body is independent of the admit rate.</p>
<p>For a more trenchant example: Swarthmore/Amherst/Williams accepted around 19%, but they’re certainly more selective than Cornell, and more on the level of schools like Penn, Columbia, et al. A lot of kids even turn down HYP to go to those schools.</p>
<p>So, sorry: student quality is not completely correlated with acceptance rate. Caltech is yet another example. Just because Cornell broke into the teens, doesn’t mean it’s going to only start attracting star students.</p>
<p>To really point out how silly your argument is: If Penn got as many applicants as Cornell did (33,000), we would have around the same acceptance rate as Princeton. Does that mean we’re as selective, and it’s “not fair”? No.</p>