Record-low admit rates for Ivy League colleges

Six out of America’s eight Ivy League colleges accepted record low percentages of applicants this year, CNN reported.

It has never been statistically harder to get into Harvard (admit rate: 5.9 percent), Yale (6.8 percent), Princeton (7.9 percent), Dartmouth (9.4 percent), University of Pennsylvania (12.3 percent) or Cornell (16.2 percent).

James Onwuachi, a college guidance counselor at the Westminster Schools, a private Christian day school in Atlanta, Ga., told the Yale Daily News that he wasn’t surprised by the Ivy League’s increasing selectivity. "You couple the size of the high school age population that are seniors, along with the proliferation of online applications, and you expect that kind of selectivity," Onwuachi said. "It's like an arms race."

Harvard admitted only 2,032 of the 34,302 students who applied, CNN reported.

"We have always been conservative about the number of acceptances sent out at this time of year in order to avoid the possibility of overcrowding. Harvard's high graduation rate – typically 97 to 98 percent – leaves little margin for error," William Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions and financial aid, said in a statement, according to CNN.

Only Columbia University and Brown University accepted a higher percentage of students this year than last, CNN reported. Columbia’s admit rate was 7.4 percent, up from 6.9 percent last year. Brown accepted 9.6 percent of applicants, up from 8.6 percent last year.

With odds like these, some students may have decided applying was not worth the effort. The class of 2016 submitted a total of 242,672 applications to all eight Ivies, 3,062 fewer than last year, the Daily Pennsylvanian reported.

Students have until May 1 to choose which college they’ll attend in the fall.

More from GlobalPost: Burma: Ready for business?