<p>
</p>
<p>My guess why the top universities seem more selective now than a few years ago is that the top students are feeling pressure to apply to more colleges now than they used to. (Which also gives colleges more opportunities to reject applicants.) When I applied in 2007, I was taught that 6 was a normal number of colleges to apply to and anything beyond 10 was just plain crazy. Nowadays I see plenty of students on CC applying to more than 10 colleges. </p>
<p>The Common App was already universally accepted by the top schools when I was applying to college in 2007, and had been for several years. I don’t see why it would have such a big impact on international admissions after 2008 but not before.</p>
<p>It seems unlikely to me that rising admission rates to the top universities since 2008 (when Peterson’s stopped publishing these data) have been primarily due to international students. If you do the math, you’ll notice that the number of international applicants would have to grow exponentially to have a significant impact on the total admission rate. I’ll take [url=<a href=“http://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/stats]MIT[/url”>Admissions statistics | MIT Admissions]MIT[/url</a>] as an example because they published their international admission statistics for 2011. MIT is also a good example because it’s arguably one of the most popular universities among international applicants; international students probably have a smaller impact on the admission rates at less prestigious universities of the same size.</p>
<p>MIT Fall 2011 statistics</p>
<p>Total admission rate 9.7%</p>
<p>Domestic applicants: 13,979
Domestic admits: 1,595
Domestic admission rate: 11.4%</p>
<p>International applicants: 3,930
International admits: 147
International admission rate: 3.7%</p>
<p>If MIT had 3,000 international applicants in 2007 with everything else the same, their total admission rate would have been 10.3%. If they had 2,000 international applicants, with everything else the same, their total admission rate would have been 10.9%. Think about it: even if the number of international applicants had doubled since 2007, the total admission rate would only change by 1.2%.</p>
<p>However, MIT’s actual admission rate in 2007 was 12.5%, 2.7% lower than in 2011. That indicates to me that most of the change is due to a rise in domestic applications. </p>
<p>(I am fairly confident that the lower acceptance rate in 2011 is NOT due to a higher yield rate because MIT actually accepted 200 more students in 2011 than in 2007, which points to a lower yield. I couldn’t find their actual yield rate for 2011 because the most recent Common Data Set is not online yet. Note that lower yield rates are consistent with the hypothesis that students are applying to more colleges on average.)</p>