Ivy League schools along with some other highly selective colleges and universities have been proudly announcing historically low admissions rates for freshmen entering next fall — as if the figures actually have real importance and meaning, the Washington Post reports. Thanks to the rise of the college rankings, led by the powerful U.S. News & World Report rankings, colleges and universities have been bending over backwards to find ways to make their “selectivity rates” — that is, the percentage of students they accept vs. the number of applications they get — look as low as possible. It is one of the criteria that helps push schools up in the rankings. Harvard University just announced an all-time low rate of 5.9 percent and, it seems important for people to know, is the seventh consecutive year that Harvard’s admission rate has fallen! It so happens that the applicant pool of 34,302 was down 1.9 percent from 2011, but yet, a total of 2,032 offers were made to freshmen, 100 fewer than last year…

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