Reply to Got a Smart Kid Applying for College Anytime Soon? Read this NYT Article (if you haven't yet)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am not sure if I am articulating my question clearly, so please humor me, but if you account for all of the extra "randomly fired off" applications that do not fall within the Ivy's selection profile, then is the selectivity still dramatically different than it was 20 years ago? In the 80's was the applicant pool largely comprised of qualified students? I guess that I am curious about the acceptance rate for applicants that mirror the profile of the current freshman class. [/quote]
I think I understand.  You're asking whether the accepted student profile has gotten measurably stronger, I think.  In other words, would a student admitted in the 1980s (30-35 years ago!) still be admitted today?  It's a hard question, but I think the best way to answer might be to look at the average SAT scores for admitted students.  Have they changed significantly. or are they still roughly the same?  That's not a perfect answer, but it might give a good estimate.[/quote]

This isn't scientific by any means, and I can't post a link (so feel free to skip over this) but I saw a yearbook from one of the private schools in town from the late 1980s and they definitely had many more students going to Yale and other Ivies.  I wish I could remember the number but I think it ended up being something like 40% of the class.  You could make an argument that with this private school being more affordable in the 1980s the overall cohort was brighter (more smart middle class kids?), but it's still a selective and sought-after school that has a lot of National Merit Semifinalists so I don't think you can just argue that the current student body is much weaker.[/quote]

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