The College Crunch.

• Author: Bronner, Ethan
• Position: College admission highly competitive in 1999 - Statistical Data Included

Think those sky-high SATs, stellar grades, and dazzling activities are your automatic ticket to a top college? Think again.

If anyone was ever college material, you'd think it would be Matthew D. Lerner.

The 1999 high school graduate from Swampscott, Massachusetts, took all advanced-placement courses last year and got the top score--a 5--on the calculus AP test. He scored 750 out of 800 on the verbal SAT test and 700 on the math. He was president of his school's political action club, a drum major in the high school band, religious director of his synagogue youth group, and--oh, yes--a published poet.

THE TOUGHEST YEAR EVER

But when he applied to college, three of his top choices--Harvard, Georgetown, and Brown universities--turned him down flat, while Wesleyan wait-listed him.

"Upset doesn't begin to describe how I felt," Lerner recalls.

The star student wasn't alone. Statistics and interviews with high school and college officials this fall confirm what stunned high school seniors and their parents had suspected: This year's college application season was the most competitive in the nation's history.

The reasons, experts say, include a population boom that has increased the number of applicants, a roaring economy that enables more families to afford college, and a growing belief that college is necessary for success. And they say the trend will only intensify over the next 10 years.

"We have just never had anything like this," says Robert Zemsky, director of the Institute for Research on Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's a kind of college mania."

The number of students in four-year colleges is at an all-time high: 14.8 million, up from 14.6 million last year. Kids in kindergarten through 12th grade--tomorrow's college students--are also more numerous than ever, and their ranks are expected to keep growing until 2008.

True, Matthew Lerner's fellow 1999 high school graduates numbered only 2.8 million, well below the peak of 3.2 million in 1977. But more of today's graduates are college bound--67 percent, compared with 50 percent in 1977, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Brown's director of admissions, Michael Goldberger, says applicants for its 1,360 slots included 3,000 students scoring 750 or better on the verbal SATs and 3,500 ranked in the top five in their classes. John DiBaggio, president of Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, says his school rejected one-third of the...