Over the last few weeks, colleges have begun publicly reporting some of their numbers for the 2015 application cycle. One trend that continues from the last few years is the deliberate manner in which colleges are working to increase their applications. There are a few reasons schools would want to do that, besides just becoming more selective. One Bloomberg article nicely spells out why a few small colleges in the Northeast have grown their applicant pools.
As the above article points out, even the most selective schools continue to grow in applications. Harvard received 3000 more applications this year than last. Though some argue that regardless of application growth, the Ivies continue to only benefit an incredibly small subset of the population.
There's also this nice piece about how tuition hikes help to raise a college's profile. As colleges continue to raise tuition, it's important to understand philosophically why some private schools are making that choice. Many times, that reasoning is different among public universities, whose recent tuition increases are largely in response to state budget cuts to higher ed funding.
Building on another trend from the last couple of years, more and more students are applying early. At the same time, highly selective colleges are leaning more on their early decision pools and filling increasing amounts of the freshman class from this small group of students - in some cases over 50% of the class. Relying so heavily on the early decision pool has a lot to do with the growing number of applications students are submitting, predominantly because of the Common App. By filling half of its class through binding early decision, a college hedges against not knowing which of its regular decision applicants are actually interested in the university. Early Decision, too, disproportionately benefits affluent students. Admitting 50% of your freshman class from ED usually means you've admitted a large chunk of your class without having to worry too much about how much need-based financial aid those students will need to receive in order to enroll.
Lastly (not that it should be all that surprising) we've learned in more detail this year about how schools bend admission standards for high-priority applicants. The University of Texas has come under fire, but they're certainly not the only place where the president wields his/her influence to push students through the admission process.
