[finexplained]

It blows my mind that a record-low acceptance rate is held up as an achievement, and not a structural failure. Why is the metric not "we are able to educate X% of students who meet this well-defined bar"? There are some departments in institutions (think CS) who, in the face of exploding enrollments, have made every effort to scale their courses to accommodate as many students who are capable as possible. And they do that with substantially fewer resources than many of these Ivies. Why, as a society, do we tolerate universities selling "exclusivity" instead of education?

[beojan]

A low acceptance rate just means either there were more applications than usual or fewer places than usual.

A record high number of applications is, of course, an achievement in terms of encouraging those applications.

> There are some departments in institutions (think CS) who, in the face of exploding enrollments, have made every effort to scale their courses to accommodate as many students who are capable as possible

I would be very surprised if they could do this without lowering the standard of the education provided to each student.