Between 1960 and 1966, the State University system had 92 percent of

here is the official explanation from Kaplan

It was B vs E when i read it first for reasons below:

B: Could be true but "could" is not a reason strong enough for a conclusion drawing question .

E: Since the argument in question clearly says that from 1967 to 1975- admission was lowered yet the capacity was full- it means that the students from previous yrs stayed longer.
It's as good as saying that a class could have 10 students. It lowered its admission rate to 3 students per annum yet its capacity was full. Implies that old students stayed longer.

E it is!

This question asks for a conclusion that can be drawn based on the statements in the stimulus, so it's an Inference question.

This stimulus states that, between two time periods, the school system's capacity filled up despite the fact that the college was admitting fewer people for every available spot in the system.

In this, or any other Inference question, look for the answer choice that must be true given the statements in the stimulus. It is not always possible to make an exact prediction, but take a moment to understand the implication of the information provided. According to the stimulus, the school system had the same capacity. To fill up more space, there needs to be more people coming in than going out. However, there are fewer people coming in, so there must be even fewer people moving out!

(E) must be true and is correct. For the percentage to increase, either more people have to move in or fewer people have to leave. Since fewer people are moving in, fewer people must be leaving. They must be sticking around longer.

(A) has no support from the stimulus. Just because this phenomenon occurred for one university at one point in time, it does not mean that it is generally true.

(B) might be true, but it is not necessary that it be true. Since the admission rates are given in number per 100 available spots in the school, it is not necessary that the number of spots decline in order to have an increasing rate of filled spots.

(C) is unsupported. There's no information in the stimulus about application rates.

Similarly, (D) could be true, but again, does not need to be true. As discussed above, fewer dropouts is only one way that average length of enrollment in the system could increase is by having fewer dropouts.

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hello! after reading thru the answers i'm not really sure how to arrive at the right reasoning to eliminate B and get to E. I thought B seemed good by the reasoning: previously the school had x spots available in total (say y = 500) and could admit 31 per 100 after placing its upper classman who numbered 61 per 100 (i.e. total of 305) e.g. (as it would not make sense to kick out existing senior students to admit new ones).

going by B and assuming the enrolment hasn't changed, if the school were to have a reduced number of available spots e.g. 400 - this would mean that 305 upper classman would take up a greater % of places per 100, leaving the school less places to admit new students in total, and therefore less % per 100

may i know how i can correct my thinking? i read thru the posts and noted some said capacity remains constant but i couldn't see where we can get that assumption from.

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