A few years ago, there was a mini-trend of showboating about how many universities that accepted you. It is not difficult to apply to dozens of schools, with the assumption that you are not going to attend, but only to post that you got accepted on social media. Type A parents encourage this since it reflects on them as well (must be a good parent if the kid got accepted to 20+ universities).
Universities have caught on to this trend, and use other heuristics for acceptance like "has this person ever emailed us or visited the campus?" and not just taking applications as the only input. So acceptance rates have started to reflect this. Sorting through 1000's of throw away applications to find those who might actually want to attend.
The longer I live, the less I'm impressed by fancy schools.
They don't make great labor. They are normal labor with egos until the age of ~25. Then they become normal labor without egos as the system killed their ego.
I really expected some secret sauce in Ivys/UoM, and nope. Electrical Engineers there didn't know how to figure out mass of a part given density(based on material) and volume.
Because in America, Ivy versus non-Ivy isn't the distinction.
What matters is your major and whether it is a well respected program.
A CS@Texas student will have the ability to open the exact same doors professionally and prestige wise as a CS@Brown student.
You have Ivies, Ivy Tier Privates (Stanford, Chicago, Duke, USC, Caltech, MIT, NYU, Northwestern, Georgetown, CMU), and Public Ivies (Cal, UCLA, UCSD, Mich, UIUC, UW, UT, GT, Purdue, UNC Chapel Hill, UVA) that all recruit the same kind of applicant and place in the same careers and employers.
They ain't. A non-trivial amount of people have not heard of Brown or Dartmouth, and confuse UPenn with Penn State. Hell, I didn't hear about Brown until high school and I ended up attending an Ivy lol.
And employers and us alums of these programs know the difference is marginal.
I don't think anyone on the west coast of the US cares if you're an Ivy grad. Now, Stanford grads on the other hand, every employer seems to cream their jeans over them, for whatever reason. I knew a tech company that sorted their resumes into "Stanford" and "Everyone else". Having not gone there, I don't understand what the fuss is all about.
The Northeast isn't the rest of America, the same way someone in Maine isn't necessarily going to think about CMC or Harvey Mudd similarly Brown or Dartmouth doesn't come up much or at all.
The acceptance rate is sort of a weird criteria for NYU when you compare it to the other schools it is listed with. It is a very popular school so it gets more applicants than 3-4 of the other colleges it is listed with combined, it has a slightly higher rate than most of those schools. It also accepts more students than probably all of those schools. I went there it is a good school. I don't think most people would put it in the same category as MIT. I certainly do not think it is as prestigious.
If you are using acceptance rates as a proxy for difficulty of schools in a given year, you need to adjust by desirability of location and perceived seriousness of degree programs.
And across time you have to adjust acceptance rates for the fact they are all way lower now because kids send out 2-3x as many apps.
A lot of kids even 20 years ago were applying to schools in NYC/Boston/DC on east coast because they wanted to be in NYC/Boston/DC. Many of my friends went to said schools for psychology/film/etc type programs at schools that as an engineering major were decidedly for me "safety schools". Many of these were 50% admit then and 10% admit now. I don't think they suddenly became as difficult as MIT.
Meanwhile many engineering schools (the types with Institute in the name) that were in cold rural boring areas had higher acceptance rates than my "safety schools" in Boston.
This trend has seemingly only accelerated. For example picking 3 schools in Boston to isolate just the difficulty feature:
* In 2005 MIT acceptance was ~16% vs 4% now (1/4).
* BC was ~30% vs 15% now (1/2).
* BU was ~68% vs 11% now (1/6).
So theres an argument that the harder the school the less dramatically its acceptance rate has compressed, while desirable good but not super hard schools (which have fluffy majors available) have had a larger effect.
