"Last year, I spoke to a group of parents of high school students in Connecticut about college admissions and a parent asked me afterward why it’s so hard to get accepted to college these days. I said it’s only difficult to get into some colleges.
‘Yes, selective colleges,’ she corrected herself, but then added, ‘what makes a college selective?’
It’s a good question that most students anxious to go to one probably can’t answer. As I mentioned in last week’s column, selectivity is largely defined by Barron’s in its publication, ‘Profiles of American Colleges.’
But our perception of selectivity has also changed drastically in the last three decades." …