Daughter is a strong student academically with tons of AP/IB and ECs. Potential recruited athlete who has already been talking to coaches as Bates, Wesleyan, and Vassar. White, southern. Public school.
In the abstract, in terms of ED admission are these schools all relatively the same? I know that Vassar in particular and Wesleyan tend to get a lot more applications from women than men. Strategizing ED 1 vs ED2 for these three in particular.
Also have legacy status at Wesleyan although I can’t imagine they place a lot of weight on that.
Overall acceptance rates by sex (ED and RD):
Bates - Men 13.6%, Women 13.9% (about even…)
Wes - Men 18.5%, Women 12% (harder for women)
Vassar - Men 25.8%, Women 15.8% (harder for women)
Even though their overall admit rate is the lowest, Bates’s ED admit rate is the highest. Plus, they do not appear to disfavor women in the admissions process, like Wes and Vassar do. So I think in the ED round, Bates is statistically your best bet.
However, in the RD round, Bates would be the worst bet – their RD admissions rate is the lowest.
All that being said, I suggest only applying ED to a school if it is your favorite and it is affordable.
Are you asking how to decide if she is not a recruited athlete at any of these? If not a recruit, I would have her pick her favorite school for ED, as long as the NPCs show it will be affordable.
Has the coach from any of these schools requested a pre-read? If she ends up being a recruited athlete with full coach support, it’s likely that will require an ED app. Recruited athletes generally have very high admit rates. Make sure to ask each coach what proportion of their recruits with full support have been accepted (historically). Vassar’s process is a bit different than Bates or Wesleyans.
I think you might know this already, but just in case - and you can always look at discussions in the Athletic Recruits topic - if your daughter is formally supported by one of the coaches at any of these three schools (as her first choice) and passes the pre-read, the shared expectations are 1) that she applies ED1 to that school and 2) she will almost certainly be accepted.
Beyond looking at acceptance rates, you may want to compare student profiles to see where your daughter might find her best academic match. Wesleyan and Vassar tend to be more similar to each other than to Bates in this respect. For example, these are the figures for the percent of attending students who graduated in the top tenth of their high school classes (to the extent that information for this is available):
Let’s give the complete context of these numbers to demonstrate how meaningless they are:
Wesleyan 79% in top 10%…only 24.1% of matriculants reported class rank
Vassar 77% in top 10%…23% of matriculants reported class rank
Bates 55% in top 10%…20.3% of matriculants reported class rank
One can not make any comparisons as to the relative strengths of students at each of these schools based on data that 75%+ of matriculants did not submit. If you are using other data to suggest how one might find an academic match please share.
Actually, if you were to apply additional statistical methods to the figures, such as by calculating coefficients of historical consistency and coefficients of concordance with other information, you would see how to draw significance from them. In any case, you gave far from the complete context for these figures.
Right – Bates has far fewer applicants than do Vassar and Wes. But they are practicing yield management – their ED acceptance rate is like 5-6 times higher (didn’t break out the calculator on that…) than their RD rate, and hooks cannot possibly explain all of that. There’s no way every ED applicant is hooked – maybe half, but still not enough to say that ED does not confer a real advantage for the average excellent unhooked applicant. They want the kids who want them.
So they probably take kids in the ED round that Wes and Vassar would reject, leading to the difference in admit stats that you mentioned. Bates seems to care more about yield than stats. Like Tulane.
Now – if the OP is truly a recruited athlete, and she gets coach support from all three schools… then she should just pick her favorite, and apply ED there. But for any other kid or parent reading this thread, Bates is statistically the best bet for ED.
They are all excellent LACs and IMO they are academic peers. Have you visited the schools? When I toured LACs with my D we felt that each school had a particular “vibe.” Some schools my D immediately gravitated towards and others she did not feel were as good of a match. I do think that fit is critical – in your D’s case I’d explore fit with both the school and the team.
Congratulations. We’ve been through NESCAC (and outside the conference) recruiting. Perfunctory though it may sound, these are great schools and your D should attend the one she likes most. I say that because they’re comparable academically and because the sports part of it may not work out. It’s not that uncommon for recruited athletes to quit or dislike their experience.
With that said, recruiting does of course confer a huge leg up in admissions and, assuming she likes all three schools, you’re right to want to play the strongest hand. The maddening part about D3 recruiting is knowing the most important piece of the puzzle: where your athlete stands in the coach’s mind. Many of them play it close to the vest, but eventually you should be in a position to ask whether your kid has the strongest support that is institutionally available to the coach. Once I had the answer to that question, it helped me choose the hand we’d play. I’d pay more attention to that than I would ED admission rates. If she’s in the enviable position of having all three coaches tell you that she’s going to have the benefit of the strongest support he or she can offer, then go back again and really examine which school she likes most. Look, too, at the team and the coach, and glean as much as you can and make the call on that basis rather than a few % points on ED admit rates.
One cautionary bit of advice regarding Vassar. I would never tell a kid to not apply to Vassar because it is a very good school and is held in high regard; there’s a ton to recommend it. But, and this is a big but, Vassar has the reputation, which in our experience is well earned, for not placing the emphasis on athletics that you see in the NESCAC and Centennial conferences. It probably varies a bit by sport, and by coach, and admittedly our experience is getting dated. But, for whatever it’s worth, the message we received, and it was fairly clear, was that Vassar doesn’t play the A band, B band, C band game and coaches have quite limited pull. So, based on our prior experiences, and prevailing reputation in D3 athletic circles, Vassar may be the riskiest of the three.
That was not our recruiting experience. My D22 went thru the athletic recruiting process at Vassar and schools in NESCAC and Centennial conferences. Vassar pre-read process was extensive and transparent. The end result was the if she applied ED she had full coach support and would be admitted, and if she applied RD the coach support was basically meaningless. She applied ED and was admitted. She has a teammate who was given the same offer but did not ED; the teammate applied RD and was waitlisted (and ended being chosen off the waitlist much later).
I will say that Vassar does not tend to give athletes the edge other schools do once they are on campus. I know at least one NESCAC school allows athletes to register for classes first. Some schools group athletes together freshman year. Vassar treats them just like other students.
N=1 experience last year: passed the pre-read at Haverford, did not at Vassar. Not sure if that was because of different standards, different amounts of coach interest, or different amounts of coach pull. Vassar coach did not elaborate on the results.
Not my experience at all. As a clarification, all the NESCACs were transparent, as was Vassar, about the process, and I didn’t mean to suggest that the process wasn’t similar as it relates to a pre-read and then applying ED to get coach support. What I said is that, by reputation, the coaches have less pull at Vassar. That’s a different statement.
In our recruiting efforts, if there was only one thing every single staff had in common it was that they warned that coaching support wasn’t any kind of guaranty. Every single one was cautious about that, and all of my athletes were pretty strong applicants, one of them especially so. Hamilton, Wesleyan and Amherst especially hammered this point home. Nobody ever said anything like, “… and she’ll be admitted.” At Vassar, this warning also came with the caution about the limits to coaching support, with the coach actually calling it out as a disadvantage that she had to deal with relative to her competition.
As to “edge” after admission, of any sort, I have never heard anything remotely even suggesting any such thing at any NESCAC school. It certainly wasn’t true at any of the schools my kids attended.
We passed the pre-reads, but with full appreciation of the coach’s transparency about the limits of her pull, we played ED elsewhere at a school that is typically viewed as a smidge harder admit.
For my Wes kid, her sport at Vassar has never been competitive and they weren’t super serious about it. There was a brand new coach who was very new to D3 recruiting process and so that was a little unnerving. He just didn’t yet know what he was doing. But both kids really, really liked Vassar.
You raise an interesting point. Two honest questions about this approach. Before Bayesian theory is imported to better flesh out the significance of the admittedly incomplete data set, don’t we need to first ascertain that the missing data set (let’s just say it tends to be 70% or 80% of kids / schools who don’t report rank) is missing completely at random? That is to say, for example, that we’d need to ensure that the missing class rank data is not missing as a result of any kind of selection bias in the way, say, that missing test score data is affected entirely by selection bias.
Assuming that’s not an issue, the other question I’d pose is whether the most relevant of the coefficients aren’t already available in the CDS? So, for example, I’d assume that GPA ranges and percentages would be one of those coefficients you’d consider in helping to statistically extrapolate meaning from the incomplete class rank data. Why don’t we just look at GPA, since that is 100% available in any CDS, and ignore class rank given the degree to which the data set is incomplete? I suppose one response would be that GPA can be understated due to rigor, which would be captured in at least some (but not all) class rank methodologies.
I’m not a statistician by any means, as I’m sure you can tell, so take my inquiry with a huge grain of salt. I’m just curious.
In response to a question by me about getting the classes a student wanted and scheduling classes around sports, the NESCAC coach told me that there was no official favoritism but “it just happened” that athletes got the best [I don’t remember if it is draw numbers or time slots or how exactly the registration works]. And that it “just happened” every single time. D22 did not end up applying to that school.
I appreciate all the feedback. We have visited all three schools and I graduated from Wesleyan so I know that one well. All three schools have requested materials for pre-read and since it’s just transcript, classes for next year and school academic profile I don’t think what she’s providing could be disqualifying in any way, but certainly no guarantee that any of the coaches are to the point of advocating for her through the ED process.
Not disqualifying in any way shape or form. Right now you/your daughter needs to be focused on the athletic recruiting side of things. If she gets an offer of full coach support, which sounds likely given the numbercof prereads, she will have to decide which offer to accept. And then she will need to ED to that school.