There was a time not so long ago when Johns Hopkins was widely considered a place where you might want to go to grad school, but not necessarily undergrad, because it had a reputation of favoring its high-level researchers over its lowly freshmen. But those days are long over, and Hopkins has been increasingly popular with high school seniors in recent years… this year in particular. Regular decision applications to the Class of 2018 were up 16.2 percent over the year before, making this the eleventh year in a row that Hopkins has had a record-breaking number of applicants.

Maybe you’re saying to yourself, “A 16 percent increase sure does sound like a lot, but maybe that’s just a symptom of kids applying to more schools, or of population growth, or something like that.” Nope: Harvard has been seeing its application numbers decline by 1 or 2 percent in recent years; Princeton saw its applicant numbers remain essentially the same; and the current high school population is actually starting to decline slightly.