Do you think it’s because it’s so much easier to apply to a lot of colleges now with everything being on the internet? Back in the day it was all done by hand, you couldn’t surf the web and look at the far away colleges on youtube etc., and for most kids those schools were just names.
Now the world feels a lot smaller and a lot of kids are like, why not apply to Stanford, looks good on the internet! Which, in turn, drives Stanford’s acceptance rate below 5% because there’s really no downside to applying to something that looks so good (other than the probable no and the $100 for the application).