Pride has nothing to do with it, neither does MiT. A lower admission rate does not make one school better or more brag-worthy: it is just the data. Many peer schools have extremely low admissions %, especially for Engineering and/or CS: they are just popular fields right now, and colleges that offer them get many more applicants than they used to. Some, like Penn, have fairly small cohorts each year. Penn has 370 single-degree Engineers in the matriculated class of ‘27, and 87 dual-degree program Engineers(28viper, 59M&T) : at Parents’ weekend the same dean had slides of those #s, said almost 15,000 of the total application pool (ED and RD)was to Engineering, &repeated that it was the lowest acceptance rate ever, and that they somewhat over-yielded. The math checks out and supports the orientation speech. The point in sharing that the rate was announced so low was to add some real data for just how competitive Penn (and many other schools in Engineering) has gotten.
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