Sandbox

At what point will a school’s acceptance rate drop to zero?

Duke accepted just 12.6 percent of applicants who applied this year. Penn took only 12.3 percent, Princeton 8.4 percent, Yale 7.4 percent and Harvard an obnoxiously low 6.2 percent (H8 you, Harvard).

It’s a record year! They’re the smartest, most qualified, most diverse group ever! There’s an award-winning sharp shooter who was born blind, a senior who has lived in all 50 states, a track star who ran a four-minute mile—then did it again backward!

Setting records is such a cliche, anyway.

It’s making us a little bit uncomfortable. We even tried to turn you away before you applied.

Don’t these kids read The New York Times, where Columbia proved their wit as an institution of “higher” learning with a huge drug bust? Didn’t they see that one Harvard student’s fake resume, or the other Harvard student who preferred to learn his pretenses at Andover? What about the list of classes at Stanford that showed some student-athletes just want to be athlete-students?

As for Duke, we proved we could “create a wildly distorted image” of the school. Our prez said it himself! Don’t they know how to open a PowerPoint file? Or read a Caitlin Flanagan article?

Either any press truly is good press, or the Class of 2015 outsmarted us. (Maybe we should have expected it.) They saw through our attempts to turn them away and realized that schools like Duke aren’t such bad places to attend after all.