Here are a few sobering truths about the increasingly competitive landscape of college admissions taken from this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/01/opinion/college-admissions-applications.html, which helps to explain some of the decisions our seniors received. To our underclassmen, brace yourselves!

1. “The so-called Ivy-Plus schools — the eight members of the Ivy League plus M.I.T., Duke, Chicago and Stanford — collectively received about 175,000 applications in 2002. In 2022, the most recent year for which totals are available, they got more than 590,000, with only a few thousand more available spots.”
2. “In 2002, the nation produced 134 perfect ACT scores; in 2023 there were 2,542.” Unbelievable!!!
3. “Last year the Supreme Court’s historic decision ending race-based affirmative action left colleges scrambling for new ways to preserve diversity and students groping in the dark to figure out what schools wanted.”
4. “Finally, this year the whole financial aid system exploded into spectacular disarray. Now, a month after most schools sent out the final round of acceptances, many students still don’t have the information they need to determine if they can afford college.”