[82lsju]

On the conjecture that many of us would not have been admitted to Stanford if applying today, that is unquestionably true. How true is a bit fuzzy, but in general our raw odds of admission would be much lower. In 1967 when I was admitted your "odds" were 20%. Today it is 4%. It may be that today a much higher percentage of applicants to Stanford are reaching beyond what their qualifications will support and actually have almost no chance of being admitted. Conversely, many highly qualified applicants may be applying to all the "elite" schools simply hoping they get admitted to at least one of them. That didn't happen much back in 1967. Massive grade inflation is also a factor, as well as the much more common availability of AP classes. Probably the best guess for our class if applying today, 80% of the admits would be different people than were actually admitted in 1967, just based on the acceptance percentage alone.

so in your day there were probably ~13,000 applicants (I'm assuming  round numbers to make the math easy so SWAGGING ~2,000 enrolled, lets assume a 75% yield so ~2,700 admitted at 20% rate so ~13,000 applicants).  

The last info I saw on number of applicants to Stanford was a year or two ago and it was on the order of ~55.000 so ~4x the applicants today.  

This more or less maps to what I see for my friends kids applying to college, when I applied in 1978 most of my peers applied to 3-5 colleges, today many of my friend's kids apply to 10-20 colleges.

[82lsju]

On the conjecture that many of us would not have been admitted to Stanford if applying today, that is unquestionably true. How true is a bit fuzzy, but in general our raw odds of admission would be much lower. In 1967 when I was admitted your "odds" were 20%. Today it is 4%. It may be that today a much higher percentage of applicants to Stanford are reaching beyond what their qualifications will support and actually have almost no chance of being admitted. Conversely, many highly qualified applicants may be applying to all the "elite" schools simply hoping they get admitted to at least one of them. That didn't happen much back in 1967. Massive grade inflation is also a factor, as well as the much more common availability of AP classes. Probably the best guess for our class if applying today, 80% of the admits would be different people than were actually admitted in 1967, just based on the acceptance percentage alone.

so in your day there were probably ~13,000 applicants (I'm assuming  round numbers to make the math easy so SWAGGING ~2,000 enrolled, lets assume a 75% yield so ~2,700 admitted at 20% rate so ~13,000 applicants).  

The last info I saw on number of applicants to Stanford was a year or two ago and it was on the order of ~55.000 so ~4x the applicants today.  

This more or less maps to what I see for my friends kids applying to college, when I applied in 1978 most of my peers applied to 3-5 colleges, today many of my friend's kids apply to 10-20 colleges.