Best Brightest And Rejected: Elite Colleges Turn Away Up To + Summary

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In his article, “Best, Brightest and Rejected: Elite Colleges Turn Away Up to 95%” Richard Pérez-Peña asserts that American top universities’ acceptance rates dropped dramatically in recent years. He emphasizes that college acceptance rate dropped abruptly because of the massive numbers of application deluging into the top universities. Pérez-Peña reaffirms the difficulty of entering elite schools by giving personal experiences of a student who applied to eleven colleges under extreme stress and another student who Stanford turned down. Unlike the slowly growing available college seats, the number of applications students send in grows swiftly, ultimately resulting in colleges having to turn down most of the applications. Continuing in his …show more content…

Even though many selective colleges reject a vast majority of their applications, Pérez-Peña still verifies the possibility of entering the elite school through giving an example of a student who received an offer at Yale. Furthermore, he affirms that even though the students understand the difficulties of receiving offers from colleges, they keep sending in extremely high numbers of application, which ultimately forces the acceptance rate down. Additionally, Pérez-Peña advocates that uniformed on-line application makes the process of applying to colleges efficient and simple; however, it has also increased the number of colleges each student applies to. Also, colleges have started aggressively reaching out to the prospective student with emails and mailings, having a decent intention. Unlike a generation ago, when highly competitive colleges rarely offered places to less than twenty percent of their applicants, the admission rate for many schools has dropped below ten percent these past few years. Although top universities’ acceptance rates have decreased in recent years, some small colleges have higher admission rates, as Amherst, Harvey Mudd, or Middlebury, which Pérez-Peña recommends in his article. Concluding his article, Pérez-Peña emphasizes the shocking phenomena of the low