As summer fades and the school year starts, one topic haunts the mind of almost all high school students—college. Specifically, how to get in to one. While I can’t promise this article will get you into college, it will teach you a little bit more about the college acceptance process. I’m here to bust a widespread myth about college. The myth: colleges are harder to get into now than they were twenty years ago. The truth: let’s find out…

Part one—the statistics.  In 1994 Harvard College, one of the best schools in the country, boasted a selective 18% acceptance rate according to the Harvard Crimson. Twenty years later in 2013 the acceptance rate was a shockingly low 6.3%, according to US News & World Report. So Harvard accepts a significantly smaller fraction of students than it used to. But this phenomenon is not limited to just one school. In 1996 the University of Florida accepted 57% of applicants, according to its own website. By 2010 this number had dropped down to 39%, again from US News & World Report. So we’ve established a trend—universities are accepting a significantly lower fraction of their applicants than they were twenty years ago.

This brings us to part two—why is this so? Unsurprisingly, there are not significantly more smart kids today than there were twenty years ago. Rather students apply to more colleges than they used to while roughly the same number are accepted. This makes colleges seem like they are harder to get into. Integral to this phenomenon has been the popularization of the Common Application (also known as the Common App), which is one online application that many colleges use. In the 1990s around a hundred and fifty schools used the Common App. Now that number is closer to 500. Another reason students are applying to more colleges is because they want to cover all their bases—so if they don’t get into their first choice, they still have their second, third, etc.

Another reason for lower acceptance rates is that more students are applying to college altogether. This is because of higher high school graduation rates and higher college-going rates. As Mrs. Hoversten explained to me, there’s an “increase in the number of students graduating from high school each year…and more young people see college as an attainable goal.” Increased aid programs have also boosted college-going rates as schools provide financial aid to students who might otherwise be unable to attend.

The final reason for the lower acceptance rates is to help colleges’ reputations. High application rates combined with low acceptance rates give colleges a better ranking. So schools will encourage lots of students to apply, knowing they can’t accept all of them.

So here are the phenomena driving down college acceptance rates: there are more high school grads and more of them are applying to college than ever before, and traditional college-bound students are sending out multiple applications. So keep your chin up—your top choice might not be as hard to get into as you thought. Consider this myth busted.