Right, and because the competition is so intense, it has–perhaps paradoxically–led to a situation where admission standards have actually become more and more arbitrary, and focused on issues outside of academics. I’m not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing, but there is no doubt that it has happened.
This has happened partly because, of the thousands of people applying to these schools, most of them are top-notch students who would do fine if they were admitted. @Mighty_Mouse said that his/her (?) niece had “no realistic chance” of getting into MIT or the Ivies, but I’d be willing to bet that, if one of those schools actually accepted her, she probably would have thrived, and done just as well as many of the students they did accept. Here’s a 2001 Report on Harvard College, 1995-2000, written by the Dean. This report notes that applications in 2000 were an all-time high of 18,693 (less than half of current applications), and that, of these applicants, “the vast majority are students fully capable of performing well at Harvard if they were admitted.”
So these prestigious schools get 10 or 20 times more applicants than they can admit, and the vast majority of the applicants are academically outstanding and would do fine in their classes. What they do, then, is begin to build a university community. They look at race and ethnicity; they look at gender; they look at background, location, extracurricular activities, tragic family stories, quirky anecdotes, etc., etc., etc, all in an effort to engineer a particular image for the university. As I said, I’m not really suggesting that there’s anything wrong with doing it this way, but here’s little doubt that it makes the system more arbitrary, and that getting into many of these prestigious schools, assuming your academics are outstanding, has become almost like throwing your name into a very large hat and hoping that you’ll be one of the lucky people picked at random.
Although it helps if your parents can shell out thousands of dollars for a college applications coach, who knows how to massage and tweak your application in ways that are most likely to catch the attention of the admissions people.
Or unless you’re a legacy, of course. Then you’re fine.