As the U.S. population grows while the class size of Ivy League schools hardly changes, inevitably the bar for admission to those schools is raised.
...The quality of Ivy-rejected candidates continues to improve, which is great news for Flagship State University.
And given that the admissions arms race is so toxic, and the winners often so significantly damaged by the process, it's time for a radical re-think on whether an Ivy education is still desirable, by either prospective students or hiring employers.
I'm not sure if the term "raise the bar" is appropriate, and I have similar feelings about the quality of rejected applicants improving. Those terms are conceptually so broad, and yet the criteria they apply to are, in practice, so narrow: high grades and high SAT scores. I'm not convinced that many of these kids are really participating meaningfully in all those extracurricular activities, and I wonder how many are only signing up to check a box ("fencing looks good on college apps; FFA, not so much").
As a group, these kids strike me as being groomed for Ivy League admissions more than anything else. I'm not saying they aren't intelligent and hard-working, because they are. But they're still groomed, and the arms race for college admissions doesn't leave a lot of room for failure, exploration, or taking meaningful risks (as in, the kinds of risks that can help you grow as a person but might bring your GPA down out of the stratosphere).
