[finexplained]

I've never understood why the measure that universities seem to care about is the number of students they reject instead of the number of students above their bar that they are able to educate.

Harvard could easily educate 1-2 orders of magnitude more students than they currently do with their resources. They explicitly choose not to. There are far more students capable of handling and benefiting from a Harvard-level education than currently have access to it.

And for those who are going to respond something akin to that's not the objective Harvard is optimizing, I'm well aware. I'm just lamenting the way things currently are.

[chrismcb]

I don't think any school can educate 300,000 to 3 million students. They might have the money, but it would require a lot more resources, and mist likely sister colleges. But even so, yes Harvard chooses to keep their acceptance rate low, and that is their prerogative.