Today's American Prospect has a great piece deflating the recent glut of upper-middle class scare pieces on increasing selectivity in elite college admissions. Author Kevin Carey's point is that "[t]he declining odds of getting into an elite college are mostly a statistical mirage, caused by confusion between college applicants and college applications."
A little statistic data sheds a lot of light on the situation. Carey notes that, while the number of high school graduates have jumped by 8% in the past four years, so has the number of acceptance letters mailed out by "elite" colleges and universities. When discussing the ratio of acceptances to applications however, Carey's example is slightly less solid.
"Imagine 20 students, each of whom applies to five schools and gets into two. Now imagine if the same students each applied to ten schools and got into two. The outcome for the students is the same: two acceptance letters. But the schools report lower admission rates, and the odds of admission seem worse."
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