This year may well go down as the most competitive in the history of admission at America’s top colleges as Newsweek/ Daily Beast reporter Kristina Dell observed:
“The toughest college admissions year on record reached its apex this week as nervous seniors obsessively checked their email or a website to discover their fates. (Waiting for the fat or thin envelope? So 2005.) The hotter-than-ever Ivy League schools, which all had a record number of applicants this year, notified the lucky ones at 5 p.m. Wednesday.
It has been an especially stressful process this year. The weak economy and a wider acceptance of the common application—Columbia used it for the first time this year and had a 32 percent jump in applicants over last year—has meant the competition is steeper than ever. Over the past five years, applications to the eight Ivy League schools plus MIT and Stanford skyrocketed from just over 200,000 applications to almost 300,000 early and regular applications, for a total increase of more than 40 percent.”