I don’t know. I feel that schools like UChicago, Stanford, Harvard are now seeing a much slower decrease in acceptance rates, and a slower increase in applications than they had previously seen. In the case of UChicago, their administration and current president have really scraped the barrel in terms of grinding down their acceptance rate through aggressive measures this past decade. Recently, Northwestern seems to be following the path UChicago took, which took UChicago’s USNR from 15 to 3 between 2006 to 2017 (really feel that acceptance rates shouldn’t play a factor in rankings). That is, Northwestern has been taking measures to increase application numbers (brand new facilities, increasingly better sports, winning over highly sought out individuals to teach and research, promoting a new brand image, increasing national and international outreach) to the university and formulate a way to increase its yield rate, which, in turn, means accepting less applicants needed to fill in matriculating classes. With the current culture now, a university’s prestige is tied with its acceptance rate. You can’t really blame the administration for doing this though. Lower acceptance rates, thus more prestige, lead to increased competition by students the following year to apply in hopes they’ll get in. This may mean more qualified students available to the university, which leads to a cycle of better research, better alumni network, more money, more prestige, more quality students, and so forth. Two decades ago, being a college graduate alone was an amazing feat. Nowadays, since there are so many college graduates, only going to the top ones is impressive to family, friends, and members of society. In addition, going to the top universities nowadays actually matters, contrary to popular thought that it doesn’t. Going to a top university grants you more accessibility to more resources, more generous financial aid, stronger alumni network, recruitment from top companies, higher chances at getting accepted to graduate school etc. Anyways, I’m rambling. Unless the college application process remains the same and the culture of chasing prestigious universities remains the same, in the long run these acceptance rates will continue to drop with exponentially increasing numbers of students having more accessibility to pursue higher education. In regards to Northwestern, due to hundreds of millions of free national advertising by the NCAA this year, the flutie factor in combination with the factors I mentioned above will likely lead to a significant drop in Northwestern’s admissions rate next year… that is, unless they re-open their residential halls under rennovation or increase capacity by some other way. I think what’s driving and contributing to this is is a cancerous culture of people correlating extreme exclusivity with world class prestige and power.