Sorry, Recession Won't Get You Into Harvard

Sure, a lot of people are cash-strapped, but don’t get your hopes up that the recession will boost your shot at an Ivy League school. Harvard got a record number of applications this year—29,112, a 6% jump from last year. And pricey universities like Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Columbia, and Stanford all saw application numbers soar, the New York Times reports. Still, some top smaller schools did see a decline in applications.

Williams College applications dropped 20% from the previous year, Middlebury applications fell almost 12%, and Amherst applications about 1%. But the overall landscape is tough to pigeonhole, the Times notes: Slightly more than half the schools that accept the shared Common Application received more applications this year than they did last year, while slightly less than half received fewer.
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