My experience applying for a phd and talking to professors is it has gotten a lot more competitive. When I applied a year ago to 8 schools my recommenders thoug

My experience applying for a phd and talking to professors is it has gotten a lot more competitive. When I applied a year ago to 8 schools my recommenders thought I'd picked enough schools and had a strong enough background for top schools (2 first author papers, one at a workshop in a top conference). That led to 2 interviews, but at the end still 8 rejections. The acceptance rate for cs overall in stanford/similar schools is getting to around 3 percent. I was applying in ML which is extra popular and remember hearing that Montreal had 1000 cs graduate applicants this past year, with 500 for ML and 900 some ML overlap. Given they only want 15-20ish students a year, that's a fairly poor acceptance rate. My own undergrad was a STEM school and the number of CS majors has somewhere around tripled in the past 5ish years even though it started already high around 20 percent (yeah a majority is CS at this point). I know my school talked about how there's plenty of universities across the country that have had CS enrollment grow a ton and are having problems supporting all of them.