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A student would first submit his list of colleges to the counselor. If his first choice is Yale, but another student who is more qualified happens to choose Yale too, this child may not apply to Yale and the counselor will check the next choice in his list. This way optimizes the final outcome for the whole school and also benefit the children. The resulting acceptance rate is higher because fewer unqualified student apply. A better measure should be the rate of the number of accepted over the total class (not the number who applied)  instead.