As newspapers across the country report record-low acceptance rates among elite colleges, it may be worth remembering that, like any statistics, those rates alone do not necessarily indicate a college’s selectivity — they might simply reflect the fact that high-school seniors are applying to more colleges than ever before.
One needs to look at factors like the median SAT or ACT scores of those admitted to see whether the colleges have truly grown more selective than they were, say, a generation ago.
The humorist Andy Borowitz, writing in The New York Times, suggests a way around all those numbers for the offspring of certain alumni of one elite college. —Heidi Landecker
