Correlation problem between college rankings and acceptance rates

This is important for 9th, 10th, and 11th graders to make their college lists.

Pre-pandemic, the college landscape was already changing say from 2010-2020. More and more people were applying to top colleges. I think this was the beginning of the "HYPE" culture where clout, prestige, and bragging rights were incredibly important to both the applicants and the families that were funding them. We saw a great surge in interest from Int'l applicants and other factors in American education trends prompted more domestic applicants. The trends IMO were rampant grade inflation (both for Public/Privates high schools), more AP/IB/DE course availability, more online systems to help kids with SAT/ACT prep (Khan academy), social media platforms used to disseminate college admissions secrets (YouTube, Twitter, Insta) and a more granular explanation of what you needed to get into top schools through online blogs, vlogs, books, podcasts, audio-books, and a plethora of college consultants. This pressure to belong led many rich, powerful, and famous people to pay Rick Singer and others to bribe people to aid their spoiled brats to get into schools like Yale, USC, and Stanford through the trap door.

The result was that acceptance rates were trending downward and some Ivys went from 25%-30% to 10-15%. And other schools like NYU went from 30% and 38000 applicants to like 16.5% and 80,000 applicants. And now NYU has over 120,000 applications this cycle and the acceptance rate will be around 10%. So what's changed besides the "HYPE" culture that's made NYU gain 300% more applications, making it 300% harder to get into a dozen years ago? I don't think the quality of education is any better. Sure Washington Square park looks gorgeous but that's a city park. There still is no campus at NYU, financial aid is MEH!, and you will be hard-pressed to find team spirit, a thriving Greek life, or other checklist side benefits of attending a popular university there.

Over the last 3 cycles including this one for ED/EA we see not only more downward pressure for acceptance rates but now with sort of a free-for-all hiatus on standardized testing, more people are shooting their shots creating real problems for many colleges like housing shortages which inadvertently has made them artificially more prestigious.

So this year joining NYU in the under 10% and under acceptance club may include repeat contenders Tulane, NorthEastern, Emory, USB, UCLA, USC, CMU, Grinnell, Hamilton, Colgate, and possibly others.

While these schools are now REACH schools for the most part (10% acceptance rate or less), keep in mind that Tulane is ranked 44th, NorthEastern also 44th, USC is 25th, NYU is 25th and Emory is 22nd along with CMU. USB and UCLA are ranked 20th. Grinnell is ranked 15th on the Liberal Arts ranking with Hamilton and Colgate at 18th.

So the takeaway is that it might be easier to apply to higher-ranked colleges and get in versus some of these. For example, UMich, UVA, U of Florida, UNC, Wake Forest, UCSB, UCI, SCSD, U of Rochester, UTAustin, Wiliam&Mary U Wisconsin, and UIUC are great alternatives colleges that are academically highly ranked with more forgiving acceptance rates. And for Liberal arts colleges, I would say, Smith, Bryn Mawr, and Mount Holyoke are nearly as good as Barnard and Wellesley. Vassar, Davidson, Bucknell, Oberlin, SkidmoreOccidental, Washington & Lee, U Richmond, Kenyon, Macalester, and Soka are all excellent LACs with more forgiving acceptance rates.