A trend colleges might not want applicants to notice: It’s becoming easier to get in
This comes after a period of steadily increasing competition to get into college since around the turn of the millennium, which aggravated fears among students and their families that they’d be rejected by the institutions of their choice. Widely reported impossibly low single-digit acceptance rates at the nation’s most highly selective universities and colleges only made that apprehension worse.
Not surprisingly, 45 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds think it’s harder to get into college than it was for their parents’ generation, a survey by the Pew Research Center found.
In fact, 87 percent of nonprofit four-year colleges in 2022 took half or more of the students who applied to them, up from 80 percent in 2012, the AEI study found.
