Glen Cooper / Getty Images A freshman student enters the Admissions Building at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.

One of the most persistent concerns I hear from parents is that it’s harder than ever for their children to get into selective colleges. They cite ever dropping acceptance rates among top schools and the rapidly increasing numbers of applications that the most selective colleges receive year over year as evidence. This inexorable trend has become somewhat mythic. (Meanwhile, Dartmouth, Williams, Vassar, Princeton, Hamilton and Amherst all saw slight declines in the number of applications for fall 2013.)

What many parents and students don’t realize is that increasing numbers of applications isn’t necessarily a sign that it’s harder to get into a selective school; rather, it’s a sign of changes in behavior among high school seniors. More and more people who aren’t necessarily qualified are applying to top schools, inflating the application numbers while not seriously impacting admissions. In fact, it has arguably become easier to get into a selective school, though it may be harder to get into a particular selective school.

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The inflation in the number of applications can be traced to the Common App — a single application and essay that works for multiple schools. When it was introduced in 1975 as a pilot program, only 15 schools participated. There are now 488 participating institutions, including the vast majority of selective colleges and universities. In 1998, the Common App went online, furthering the ease of applying to more schools. After all, what’s one more application when no additional paperwork is required?

The most recent study available from the National Association for College Admission Counseling shows that between 2010 and 2011 (the most recent years available), the percentage of students applying to at least three colleges rose from 77% to 79% and the percentage of students applying to at least seven colleges rose from 25% to 29%. In 2000, only 67% of students applied to three or more colleges, while 12% applied to seven or more.

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The net effect of this behavior is to create an illusion of increased selectivity. Especially at the most selective schools, an increase in applications generally leads to the acceptance of a smaller percentage of the students who apply. However, students who meet the academic and extracurricular thresholds to qualify for competitive schools will still get into a selective college; it’s just less likely that they’ll get into a specific competitive college. These schools work hard to not admit students who won’t attend; the acceptance rate and the matriculation rate (the percentage of accepted students who attend) are key measures in many college ranking methodologies, so both admitting too many students and admitting students who don’t attend can hurt a college’s ranking.

Meanwhile, the number of high school seniors is shrinking, having reached its peak in 2011. And while there has been a slow increase in the percentage of seniors who apply to college, it doesn’t add many students to the pool of applicants with academic qualifications to attend the most selective colleges and universities.

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So what does this mean for the future? Demographic trends predict that the population of high school seniors will continue to decrease over the next couple of years before rebounding to about 3.3 million, still below the peak of 3.4 million. On top of this, more schools are considered highly selective than ever before, and many of these schools have expanded the size of their freshman classes. Unless schools start to shrink the size of freshman classes in the coming years, the net effect of all these factors is that, for the remainder of this decade, it will actually be easier to get into a highly selective school than it has been in the past. For once, there is good news for anxious parents and students.