<p>especially top 20s </p>
<p>More students are applying to the same pool of colleges.</p>
<p>Blame Congress. Alternatively, blame Obama. I think that about covers the possibilities. 
</p>
<p>The Common App has made it much easier to apply to a lot of colleges. As the list price rises, students feel the need to apply to more colleges so they can compare financial offers. And there is a vicious cycle as admission rates go down (due to more applications from the first two reasons), students feel like they have to apply more places to improve their chances.</p>
<p>More students applying to more schools should actually lead to overall higher acceptance rates, but proportionally lower yields. However, the top 20 are so desirable that their yields don’t drop. </p>
<p>A quick search turned up this analysis from College Board: <a href=“College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools”>College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools. It’s a bit older (2009), but does show that overall yields were dropping during the 2001-2008 period. Interestingly, though, average acceptance rates also dropped, which means that the overall number of students applying has risen faster than the number of spots available.</p>
<p>Google “Peter Turchin” and “intra-elite competition”.</p>
<p>Also blame the USNews rankings for giving a weight to admission rate.</p>
<p>Eyeroll… Peter Turchin isn’t important enough to affect the whole college admission cycle. He is a news blip.</p>
<p>Umm, he’s not affecting anything. I think his analysis of the structural forces & cycles in US society that have led to where we are now are spot on.</p>
<p>Back 20 or 30 years ago, few students applied to more than 1 or 2 colleges. I applied to 4 and was an outlier. </p>
<p>The economy used to allow kids out of HS to get good paying jobs; with unemployment now getting higher everyday, kids are increasingly getting the message that you need a college degree to get any kind of entry level job. </p>
<p>We are first talking about sheer numbers of college bound students.From the U.S. Dept of Education:</p>
<p>In fall 2013, a record 21.8 million students are expected to attend American colleges and universities, constituting an increase of about 6.5 million since fall 2000.</p>
<p><a href=“http://nces.ed.gov/programs/projections/projections2021/tables/table_20.asp”>http://nces.ed.gov/programs/projections/projections2021/tables/table_20.asp</a></p>
<p>Somewhere in the begining of The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admission Process at a Premier College by Jacques Steinberg (former NY Times Education reporter) addresses your question. Highly recommended reading! You can view some pages on Amazon. When this book came out Brown admission was 14%, now it is 9% so the situation has only gotten worse, but the explanation in the book on the various factors remains true.</p>
<p>Imagine that, years ago, 10 students were applying for 10 seats at 10 different colleges. They each sent off applications to 3 colleges, each college offered admission to 2 of them (66% admission rate), because they know that’s how many admission offers they need to make to fill each seat; and one of those two accepted and matriculated (50% yield rate). Each applicant had 2 offers to choose between. Each of the 10 schools gets one of the 10 students, and everybody’s happy.</p>
<p>Years later, everyone feels pressured to get into the “best” school they can, to have plenty of admission offers, to see who offers the best deal, etc. So, 10 students apply for 10 seats at 10 different colleges. They each send off 6 applications. The schools offer admission to 3 of them (only a 50% admission rate - they are becoming more selective!), because they know that’s how many admission offers they need to make these days to fill each seat. The applicants, on the other hand, know they now need to send out twice as many applications (6 instead of 3) to get half again as many offers (3 instead of 2). Each applicant now has 3 offers to choose among. One of those applicants accepts the offer at each school and matriculates (only 33% yield - they are becoming less desirable!).</p>
<p>Perversely, magazine rankings take “selectivity” into account - the colleges that get the most applications and offer acceptance to the fewest of them must be the most desirable, the hardest to get into, and therefore better, right? But those same colleges are not penalized in any way when the yield goes down correspondingly. In the above examples, the second scenario makes all the colleges look more selective and therefore would rank higher, even though the only thing that’s really different is that more college applications are being submitted total by each student.</p>
<p>You now need a college degree to do anything in life, people are becoming more and more qualified, more people are applying, the number of spots isn’t increasing. </p>