Prometheus 6

To me, this is the same problem that UT is having with their plan that guarantees admission to the top 10% of each school's graduating class: what with all the SAT prep courses, crazy parents enrolling four year olds in piano and soccer courses and what not, you now have so many qualified folk you don't have room for "gentlemen's C" students you really want to admit.

Proof? Harvard is rejecting students with perfect SAT scores. Do you think we can find a couple dozen legacy admissions less qualified...I'm using the definition of qualified that has been used to beat Black folks all about the head and shoulders...I say, do you think we can find a couple dozen legacy admissions less qualified than our rejected friend?

And I sweartagawd I'd have let it pass but for the last paragraph.

“I know why it matters so much, and I also don’t understand why it matters so much,” said William M. Shain, dean of admissions and financial aid at Bowdoin. “Where we went to college does not set us up for success or keep us away from it.”

Anyway, here's the official reasoning.

Elite Colleges Reporting Record Lows in Admission
By ALAN FINDER

The already crazed competition for admission to the nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges became even more intense this year, with many logging record low acceptance rates.

Harvard College, for example, offered admission to only 7.1 percent of the 27,462 high school seniors who applied — or, put another way, it rejected 93 of every 100 applicants, many with extraordinary achievements, like a perfect score on one of the SAT exams. Yale College accepted 8.3 percent of its 22,813 applicants. Both rates were records.

Columbia College admitted 8.7 percent of its applicants, Brown University and Dartmouth College 13 percent, and Bowdoin College and Georgetown University 18 percent — also records.

“We love the people we admitted, but we also love a very large number of the people who we were not able to admit,” said William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard College.

Some colleges said they placed more students on their waiting lists than in recent years, in part because of uncertainty over how many admitted students would decide to enroll. Harvard and Princeton stopped accepting students through early admission this academic year; that meant that more than 1,500 students who would have been admitted in December were likely to have applied to many elite schools in the regular round.

Many factors contributed to the tightening of the competition at the most selective colleges, admissions deans and high school counselors said, among them demographics. The number of high school graduates in the nation has grown each year over the last decade and a half, though demographers project that the figure will peak this year or next, which might reduce the competition a little.