<p>LA Times: seniors are all trying to cram through the same small college doors.</p>
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[quote]
IN THE LAST few weeks, the anxiety of high school seniors awaiting news of their college fates seems to have spilled over into the general population. It's easy to see why. UCLA received more than 50,000 applications, more than any other university in the country, and accepted just 11,837 of them. Harvard turned down 91% of about 23,000 hopefuls, 1,100 of whom had perfect SAT math scores. Acceptance rates for Stanford, Yale and Columbia were 10.3%, 9.6%, and 8.9%, respectively. That means thousands of valedictorians and people with grade-point averages of 4.0 or higher were passed over in favor of whatever form of superhuman DNA now constitutes a worthy Ivy Leaguer....</p>
<p>An applicant can have perfect grades and scores, be a star athlete, perform community service and exhibit dazzling talents in the extracurricular arena and still be rejected by colleges that, a decade ago, less capable students would have considered safety schools...</p>
<p>What's the point of forking over private school tuition or the astronomical taxes and housing prices in towns that have exceptional public schools when the level of competition within those schools creates zombified students and all but cancels out any one student's ability to win the prize?</p>
<p>I called Jeff Brenzel, dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale, and asked him that very question. He admitted that there is fierce competition within certain high schools but emphasized that if you're in a position to even apply to longshot institutions, you're ahead of the game. The glut of applications to a tiny fraction of colleges, he said, is the result of an artificial hierarchy created by the college-ranking system, most notably U.S. News & World Report's annual "best colleges" report.</p>
<p>"Before the rankings systems, [the process] was much more regionalized," Brenzel said. Now because of the rankings, " you have kids from Texas trying to get into a school in Maine...."</p>