Dive Brief:

• The most selective colleges are receiving, and rejecting, more applications for admission than they ever have, the New York Times reports.
• Overall enrollment in colleges and universities has dropped after peaking in 2011, while the number of high-achieving applicants has grown — especially from overseas.
• Students are sending more applications than they once did, aided by the ease of nearly universal and uniform electronic forms. The Common Application, for example, is accepted by 517 schools, up from 315 seven years ago.

Dive Insight:

According to the New York Times, 29% of students applying to college in 2011 sent out seven or more applications, compared to 9% in 1990. And the percentage is probably even higher today.

In 2003, Harvard and Princeton universities were the top schools with admission rates below 10%, while today more than a dozen are below 10%. The most selective school this year, Stanford University, accepted 2,138 students out of 42,167 applications, for a 5% acceptance rate — a new low. The University of California, Los Angeles, has the most applications: over 86,000, more than double the number in 2005, plus 19,000 transfer applications. The Times also points out that some colleges aggressively try to boost the number of applications because they are judged partly on their admission rate.