<p>What do you want to hear, Saugus? That Cornell has a lower acceptance rate? Well, it doesn’t, but so what? Any school with a 16% acceptance rate is EXTREMELY competitive, but I honestly don’t see why that is how people measure school quality. If Harvard decided next year to take a few hundred more students (all equally as talented as their typical accepted students), the acceptance rate would shoot up. Did Harvard, then, in the course of one year become a significantly crappier school? Did the professors suddenly become just a tiny bit dumber? Did the buildings decay just a little more? Of course not - little if anything would change.</p>
<p>Vice versa, imagine Cornell hired a new outreach coordinator and they decided to send out application fee waivers to inner-city/poor/low-performing schools around the country, resulting in a 5,000+ increase in applicants. The vast majority of these applicants would be rejected, and the overall accepted class would look no different than in other years…but say the acceptance rate fell to 9%. Does Cornell now, in your eyes Saugus, become a radically better school? Does the school that dashes the most high school dreams somehow provide a better education?</p>
<p>The problem here is that you are equating prestige with education. Once you get to the top 20 or so schools in this country, education quality is roughly the same. Every school has good professors and bad professors. They all have their own unique labs, research opportunities, and degree choices. The irrational human need to rank everything has led to insane high schoolers (and their parents) who think their life is defined by the number USNews deigns to place by the name of their alma mater. You are essentially asking us to tell you why you got stuck with a Lexus when you wanted a Mercedes - they’re both luxury, they’ll both take you where you need to go and impress the general population…they’re just different. </p>
<p>Let me also do something else to put this in perspective for you. Are you aware of the ivy league acceptance rates for the class of 2009 (which I have readily available to me)? Keep in mind this is the class that just graduated 3 years ago. Here a few interesting ones:</p>
<p>Brown: 15%
Darmouth: 17%
Penn: 21%
Princeton: 11%</p>
<p>Brown’s acceptance rate was roughly the same as Cornell’s this year, and both Dartmouth and Penn’s were higher than Cornell’s Class of 2016 stats. Using your logic, Saugus, Cornell in the year 2012 is a radically better school than Penn and Darmouth circa 2005, and only slightly below your beloved Princeton. </p>
<p>The bottom line is you need to chill. No one will ever look down on someone with a Cornell degree. The acceptance rates and perceived prestige are constantly changing, and it is likely that the majority of top schools will converge together within the near future anyway - it’s a lot easier to drop from 16% to 15% than it is to drop from 3% to 2%. You’ll notice in the future (if trends continue) that schools with higher acceptance rates will drop faster than those that have pretty much bottomed out.</p>
<p>Lastly, may I suggest you seek out CAPS (Cornell’s counseling office) once you arrive on campus. It is disturbing that your self-esteem is so easily affected by external factors. You were rejected by a college and now see yourself as so lowly that any OTHER college that accepts you must also be lowly - anyone that would want you must be flawed, right? That’s dangerous thinking, my friend, and you really do need some help with that.</p>