The pain of rejection

Scripps Howard: The nation's elite colleges are suffering from an embarrassment of riches: a record number of applications from top-quality students.
That, however, translates into record heartbreak for high-school seniors because that means colleges are rejecting them in record numbers. The acceptance rates for Yale, Harvard and Columbia are under 10 percent. For Stanford, it's fewer than 11 percent, and other top schools are not far behind.
It's little consolation to the kids who got the thin envelopes, but in prior years, even last year, they would have gotten in their school of choice. But it's also certainly no shame. The Wall Street Journal, which characterizes this as the "most brutal admissions season ever," reports that Penn turned down 394 of 1,045 valedictorians and 70 percent of those who got near-perfect SAT scores in math and critical reading.
Several factors are behind the deluge.
Numbers on the rise
The number of high-school graduates is increasing, an expected 11 percent over the decade. Record numbers are applying to college, about 2 million out of this year's 3 million graduates. And more of them are applying to more colleges; 26 percent now apply to six or more.
There's good reason the students are highly motivated to go to college. An Associated Press study of Census data shows that college graduates earned two-thirds more money than high school graduates -- in 2004, a median of $42,104 for college grads compared to a median of $25,360 for high school grads.
So is a degree from an elite school worth the anguish of getting in? In the short term, probably yes. But the students who graduate tend to be from affluent, successful, well-connected families and would do well no matter where they went. In the long term, over 20 years, the incomes of graduates from elite schools and the presumably lesser institutions even out.
Although there are any number of college rankings available, the question of which institutions are "elite" is, at a certain level, subjective.