Highly competitive colleges including Yale, Brown and Penn are sending out acceptance notices this week to a much smaller percentage of admission seekers than usual after sorting through record numbers of applications. The surge in interest in Ivy League colleges and other well known schools this year has been attributed in part to the coronavirus pandemic that led many institutions to eliminate requirements for standardized admissions tests. In some cases, applicants also were competing for fewer spots than usual because students who were accepted a year ago deferred admission. Harvard accepted 1,968 students for admission, just 3.4% of those who applied.