A rarer word, these days

ON APRIL 21st 1,000 high-school students will flock to Yale's Old Campus to be greeted by a three-storey, inflated statue of the university's bulldog mascot, Handsome Dan. With their admission to the university just secured, it is their turn to be feted during Yale's “Bulldog Days”, with everything from meetings with famous professors to pizza parties and, yes, the handsome hound in the flesh.

Admissions season has just concluded, and it has been another record year. The big four—Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Yale—all took less than 10% of their applicants for the first time ever. Harvard accepted just 7.1% of those who applied.

Explaining the absurd competition at the top is easy. A (peaking) population bump has increased the college-aged cohort for the past 15 years just as higher percentages of students have decided to enter university. Add to that two other factors: an intensifying obsession with big-name colleges rather than the ones that are cheapest or nearest to home, and the rollout of big new financial-aid packages at the best universities.

These trends have profoundly altered the selection process in lower ranks. So-called “almost-Ivies” such as Bowdoin and Middlebury also saw record low admission rates this year (18% each). It is now as hard to get into Bowdoin, says the college's admissions director, as it was to get into Princeton in the 1970s. That has boosted the cachet of what used to be “safety schools” for Ivy-league rejects and the selectivity of universities even lower down the pecking-order—which, after all, educate most American undergraduates.

Rarer in lower tiers, though, are good financial-aid programmes. Fees will be an even bigger worry this year as the subprime mess savages family finances. And lenders are now unable to raise cash in uneasy debt markets. Even federally guaranteed student loans may become less accessible: Sallie Mae, the largest lender, has just announced that it will charge fees for loan applications.

Some congressmen want the government to buy up securities backed by student debt, and the federal education department may step in as a lender of last resort. Even so, outside the top tiers, the big winners in this year's competition for applicants will be the ones who cause students least anxiety about how they are going to pay for all that learning.