A few years ago, there was a mini-trend of showboating about how many universities that accepted you. It is not difficult to apply to dozens of schools, with the assumption that you are not going to attend, but only to post that you got accepted on social media. Type A parents encourage this since it reflects on them as well (must be a good parent if the kid got accepted to 20+ universities).

Universities have caught on to this trend, and use other heuristics for acceptance like "has this person ever emailed us or visited the campus?" and not just taking applications as the only input. So acceptance rates have started to reflect this. Sorting through 1000's of throw away applications to find those who might actually want to attend.

The longer I live, the less I'm impressed by fancy schools.

They don't make great labor. They are normal labor with egos until the age of ~25. Then they become normal labor without egos as the system killed their ego.

I really expected some secret sauce in Ivys/UoM, and nope. Electrical Engineers there didn't know how to figure out mass of a part given density(based on material) and volume.

Because in America, Ivy versus non-Ivy isn't the distinction.

What matters is your major and whether it is a well respected program.

A CS@Texas student will have the ability to open the exact same doors professionally and prestige wise as a CS@Brown student.

You have Ivies, Ivy Tier Privates (Stanford, Chicago, Duke, USC, Caltech, MIT, NYU, Northwestern, Georgetown, CMU), and Public Ivies (Cal, UCLA, UCSD, Mich, UIUC, UW, UT, GT, Purdue, UNC Chapel Hill, UVA) that all recruit the same kind of applicant and place in the same careers and employers.