<p>It IS a tautology of sorts; that is the point of the article, not a flaw, that people don’t see this obvious fact. I’m probably misunderstanding your point, sorry. I’ll just say that the qualifications of the admitted students at these schools has not increased as much as the falling admit rates might suggest at a glance. People greatly exaggerate the increase in difficulty of admission (over let’s say 10ish years ago) for a given student. I agree with this, generally, and I think that is the article’s main takeaway.</p>
<p>Now if you shrink that 113 down to 10, I think a good case can be made that entrance is considerably more difficult for a given student (the number of perfect ACT scores, just to pick one data point, has increased 10 fold) than it was years ago. I think that is the main flaw in the article. Most parents around these parts do not care very much at all about school #113.</p>