College Admission Statistics

Arnold, are you aware of the "Tufts method" of gaming the rankings? It entails: rejecting students with very high SAT scores to look good (as you said, a school that rejects good applicants must therefore be good) with little worry about the loss of good students - they probably wouldn't land them anyway. At the same time, this increases their "yield": most of these students are going to Ivies and are only using Tufts (or other school applying strategy) as a safety school.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yield_protection

My college's dean of admissions once asked me how to reduce our acceptance rate without changing the size of the entering class. My five word answer:

Stop charging an application fee.

Sean is absolutely correct about colleges rejecting high-scoring SAT applicants.

In 1995 I was rejected by the University of Washington with 750 verbal/730 math SATs. The moral I drew -- and the story I told for several years -- was that an out-of-state white male didn't stand much of a chance at admission.

How wrong I was! I did not know until much later that my SATs would have gotten me into a number of top-tier schools. UW was the only one I appliead at, for personal reasons. Had I included an explanation along with my application, I might have gotten in.

Fortunately, in 1996 I got a job as a management consultant based on my work experience. Now I am semi-retired on a sailboat in the Bahamas. So things can turn out OK, even for a high-school dropout.