^^ Notre Dame is famous for its preference for legacies. 23% of the freshman class were legacies, almost double the average of the 10 most selective schools. Most of those kids were admitted early.
Didn’t check your math about Cornell but there is overlaps int those two groups as I’m sure you know.
The problem is that legacy percentages don’t tell you much about their impact on the overall acceptance rate because you don’t know how many applied and what their general quality is. Most schools, and I’m sure also ND, would say that there is no quality drop-off in legacy applicants compared to the general pool, so there’s no telling how the legacy acceptance rate impacts the overall ED acceptance rate. For recruited athletes, you can safely assume there is nearly a 100% acceptance rate, so it’s very easy to filter them out to tell you their impact on the overall ED acceptance rate.
I believe ND says that the average stats of the accepted legacy group is “slightly” below the average admit. The point is that a huge number of spots at ND go to legacies and athletic recruits in the early round, so the 30% is not nearly what is applicable to an unhooked applicant.
OK, but the same is true for Stanford, UVA, Duke, Northwestern and Harvard. Who cares?
@spayurpets You wrote:
So I explained what is different about them. A HUGE number of their admits are legacies!
No, it is not the same for those schools which is what I explained. I imagine anyone applying to ND would care otherwise why are you even bothering to post the acceptance rates? If no one cares what the true acceptance rates are net of hooks, why would they care about the gross acceptance rates? I’m not following your logic.
Adding Bowdoin College:
http://bowdoinorient.com/article/10824
MIT EA 656 out of 7,767 (8.4%) (4776 deferred=61.5%) (2175 rejected=28%)
Stanford REA 745 out of 7822 (9.5%)
Georgetown EA 892 out of 7027 (12.7%) (remainder deferred=87%)
Harvard SCEA 918 out of 6173 (14.9%) (4673 def=75.7%) (464 rej=7.5%)
Yale SCEA: 795 out of 4662 (17.1%) (53% def) (29% rej)
Princeton SCEA 785 out of 4229 (18.6%)
Brown ED 669 out of 3030 (22.1%) (1905 def=62.9%) (456 rej=15.0%)
Penn ED 1335 out of 5762 (23.2%)
Duke ED 813 out of 3455 (23.5%) (1663 def=19.2%)
UVA EA (OOS) 2955 out of 12308 (24.0%) (3005 def=24.4%) (6348 rej=51.6%)
Dartmouth ED 494 out of 1927 (25.6%)
Cornell ED 1338 out of 4882 (27.4%) (1153 def=23.6%) (2391 rej=49.0%)
Georgia Tech EA 4424 out of 14861 (29.8%)
Notre Dame EA 1610 out of 5321 (30.3%) (818 def=15.4%) (2893 rej=54.4%)
Johns Hopkins ED 584 out of 1929 (30.3%)
Boston College EA ~2700 out of 8600 (~31.4%)
Tufts ED ~663 out of 2070 (~32%) (estimated)
Bowdoin College ED 207 out of 614 (33.7%)
Northwestern ED 1061 out of 3022 (35.1%)
Williams College ED 246 out of 585 (42.1%)
Davidson College ED 207 out of 458 (45.2%)
UVA EA (In-State) 2237 out of 4460 (50.2%) (1060 def=23.8%) (1163 rej=26.1%)
University of Georgia ED 7500+ out of 14516 (51%+)
Middlebury College ED 338 out of 636 (53.1%) (74 def=11.6%) (224 rej=35.2%)
@Falcon1 we can speculate all we want, but we don’t have sufficient data to support that ND is special and has a different “real” unhooked acceptance rate relative to its peers. Compare ND to Stanford, for example, and tell me how to figure out that the unhooked acceptance is overstated in relation to Stanford and by what amount. First of all, we don’t know what the impact of the legacies is. Stanford has, say, 20% legacies enrolled (I’m making this up) and ND supposedly has 24% (n.b. enrolled numbers is different than accepted). This tells you nothing about what the impact is on the general applicant pool acceptance rate, unless you have some stat that says that ND accepts, say, 50% of legacy applicants and that Stanford accepts, say, 20%. And no one knows those numbers as far as i know. It could just be that ND gets more legacy applicants than Stanford does and they still have the same acceptance rate. At best it’s a small difference between Stanford and ND (it’s the delta between the legacy acceptance rate multiplied by the delta in the number of legacy applicants).
Athletes is one area where there is going to be a significant, calculable impact, but again ND is no different than Stanford (or Georgia Tech, Northwestern, BC, UVA and Duke) in this regard; they each have Division I football programs and recruit the max number of Division I scholarship athletes across all their sports. ND is no different than these Div I peers on the list and I would be surprised if they accept a larger number of athletes than these schools.
I don’t disagree that ND might have some slight difference because of the legacy issue, but it’s not clear whether its large enough to be significant.
Notre Dame’s acceptance rate for legacies is between 40-50% (last reported figure was 50% in 2008). Stanford said in 2013 that it’s legacy admit rate is 2 to 3 times the general population admit rate which would put it at 12.5% using the midpoint. As mentioned earlier, 23% of the ATTENDING class of ND are legacies. About 10% of Stanford’s are legacies. It is not a “small difference”. It should be of importance to anyone thinking of applying ED to ND.
I am going to bow out of this conversation now. I was trying to add some helpful answers to legacy comments but this is turning into something of an argument.
@spayurpets - Notre Dame gives tremendous boost to legacies as well as those who attend Catholic HS. Also, for a top school, religious self-selection significantly impacts the racial make up of the school as ND attracts more Hispanics and fewer Asians than it’s academic peers (ND is 71% white, 10% Hispanic, 6% Asian, 4% African American, and 0.4% Native American).
http://www.forbes.com/colleges/university-of-notre-dame/
It is difficult to compare ND’s admissions policies to other schools as the student pool and admissions criteria differ significantly.
Dear spayurpets, I love this site and the information and discussions I have read here and hope to continue reading here, and I am very grateful to you for establishing this site. I’ve enjoyed your comments and your due diligence in providing us with the most updated information. Thank you. You’re the best, spayurpets.
However, while I agree that it may be very difficult to provide data “to support that ND is special and has a different ‘real’ unhooked acceptance rate relative to its peers,” none of us should be so naïve to believe that legacies are not getting special treatment. The very fact that 23% of the attending students at ND are legacies demonstrates a huge favoritism for them. Anyone who doesn’t believe that the admission system at elite schools isn’t slanted in favor of legacies is living in fantasyland. Their applications, for instance, are often read one or two times more than non-legacy applicants and therefore given more time and consideration. So how do you factor that into the data? But 23%? I agree with Falcon1’s statement: “23% of the attending class of ND are legacies" whereas "about 10% of Stanford’s are legacies. It is not a ‘small difference,’ (as you characterize it). And I couldn’t agree more with Falcon1 when he says that this information “should be of importance to anyone thinking of applying ED to ND.” I mean 23%? Hell, why doesn’t ND just become a club for legacies? Indeed “ND acceptance rate is what it is” and it clearly favors legacies.
I’m sorry Falcon1 bowed out of this discussion because I appreciated what he had to say. I think while we may disagree, I hope this site remains a place for interesting discussions, like this one, spirited as they may be. As you state in your initial post, “I found this discussion topic to be a good place to aggregate this information, so I am setting up a new discussion as it comes in for the Class of 2020.” I hope this can remain a site for interesting “discussions” about ED admissions and admissions in general at the schools you’re tracking.
And a closing note: Zinhead makes an understatement when he says that “It is difficult to compare ND’s admissions policies to other schools as the student pool and admissions criteria differ significantly.” I don’t mean to sound like a prick, but not everyone embraces ND as an academic Mecca, in spite of it good reputation. For instance, last spring when all the juniors gathered for a meeting with our two college guidance counselors at my prep school, which has a lot of legacy rich kids who are ivy-league bound (who by virtue of their wealth, privilege, secondary education and opportunities clearly have an advantage in the admission process), one student asked about ND as a back-up school and the counselor likened ND to a University of Southern California for Catholics. As a Roman Catholic, I found his comment inappropriate and what seemed to be an unfair and biased assessment of the school, but that is what a prep school guidance counselor had to say. As a result I did not choose him for my counselor. Nonetheless, I would never have any desire to attend a school where 23% of its students are legacies (not to mention 71 percent white), a student pool I don’t consider very economically diverse.
Good luck to everyone.
@Maximilias, we need to be very careful not to generalize in our discussion of legacies. Yes, there are some elite colleges and universities that do provide a benefit to legacies (with all things being equal), however, there are others where the percentage of legacies is high only because of the extraordinary quality of the legacy applicant pool. For example, at HYP, legacies represent a reasonable % of the class, however, the qualifications of those legacies is, on average, above that of the average applicant in their cohort.
The era when a legacy (absent substantial family largesse) received a meaningful benefit is long gone at the vast majority of the most elite LACs or universities. Today, the benefit is generally only available in the EA/ED round, and then only provides the extra boost when all else is equal.
ND may be an outlier among elite universities in the benefit it provides legacies. As an aside, to say that ND is like a USC for Catholics might be considered a complement to ND by many. USC has improved its academic standing considerably and is now a credible top 20 university, has elite athletic programs and is of similar size (as an aside I have no axe to grind for or against either ND or USC).
Am61517, I’m still up doing homework and am getting groggy but wanted to respond. I don’t mean to generalize about legacies. I agree they are often superbly well-qualified applicants, particularly at HYP. I am, however, suggesting that the admissions process works in favor of legacies, and there is ample data to back up that belief. Check out this article, for instance, about a new report by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation about how unequal the college admissions process is: http://news.yahoo.com/report-shows-just-unequal-college-195700765.html Rather startling, isn’t it?
And check out this report recently on NPR: http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/01/15/462149341/5-ways-elite-college-admissions-squeeze-out-poor-kids
Though I personally have nothing against HYP legacies or other elite college legacies—I know plenty of them here at my school—I’m merely saying that the admissions system works in their favor. As the NPR report states, legacies frequently automatically advance to the second round of admissions, which the author likens to “affirmative action for the rich.” Clearly data demonstrates that legacies normally come from families in the top economic quartile and much more often in the top ten percent of the economic hierarchy. Thus, they can afford to do things that many others can’t, such as attend top private schools, pursue wonderful interests such as playing an instrument (which often requires expensive music teachers) or expensive sports such as skiing or sailing or equestrianism, etc. (that often require private coaching), or pay for expensive college entrance exam prep sessions and so forth. And don’t get me wrong here: I think it’s fantastic that well-off parents do these things for their children. That’s money well spent. But not every one gets to go to a really good private prep school. I’m not from a wealthy family, but I realize how very lucky I am to attend the school I do, because without the secondary education I’m getting, I doubt I would have a snowball’s chance in hell when applying to top colleges.
And so I’ll be less general and a bit more specific here by sharing my own experience. Numerous kids at my school from affluent families have taken expensive college-entrance-exam-prep sessions, that often cost two K or more, and yes they have fantastic scores but in addition to their expensive prep sessions, several of them took the SATs three times. Some of these kids even had consultants guiding them through the application process. And while they are wonderfully qualified and will thrive and succeed at the most competitive colleges, I’m suggesting there are many exceptional kids who are as intellectually gifted as they are and would also benefit greatly from attending a top elite college, but they have not had nearly the opportunities available to them as well-off kids, who frequently apply to top colleges ED and as legacies (yet another advantage) and so these kids often, who are not as academically well-groomed, statistically don’t make the top quartile of the profile of accepted students at HYP or other elite schools. That’s all I’m asserting here: that the very nature of legacies favors well-off kids, and the data bears this out. And so I don’t wish to generalize about legacies. For myself, I don’t particularly want to be surrounded by such privilege in such profusion, in particular 23 percent of an attending class, as is the case at ND. I have experienced the largesse of legacy students and their families and I’m ready to move on to a more diverse group of people.
And yes, you make a good point about USC and thus ND. They have come a long way, rather like Yale coming a long way from Dink Stover, though Jerylyn Luther’s screeching rant at the master of Silliman College (a classmate of mine was actually visiting Yale that day and witnessed it) and filmmaker Ami Horowitz film showing the filmmaker in the middle of the Yale campus getting fifty Yale students in a period of fifty minutes to sign a petition to repeal our treasured First Amendment of the Constitution may have set Yale back a little, though apparently not in the number of applications it has received this year.
Take care.
I like what @spayurpets has done with the list.
It is more of a “lumper” list which is great. I think there should be a list that compiles ED/EA/SCEA/REA data for anyone interested to see, and this is it. We can always have a caveat for every school regarding the ED/EA/etc data. However, that would defeat the purpose of this thread. It’s meant to be single-source thread for ED/EA/etc data.
The viewer of the data is the one that needs to beware of the numbers.
The primary reason the UVA data was split between OOS and in-state is that someone from the UVA head-shed requested that the numbers be separated. I agree with separating because of the large disparity between OOS and in-state EA acceptance rate AND the exact numbers were available.
Adding legacy, recruit, etc numbers to the table would be using approximate numbers and, therefore, purely speculation. We wouldn’t want that type of data in the table.
Perhaps @spayurpets can add the following statement at the bottom of the table to warn people about the veracity of the numbers:
“*** Note: Many schools direct and/or highly recommend recruited athletes and legacies to apply in the early admissions cycle. Those applicants have a higher probably of acceptance independent of ED/SCEA/REA “boost.” Therefore, the numbers shown on the table may or may not reflect the true acceptance rates for an unhooked applicant. ***”
Maybe someone else can provide a more descriptive note bene.
Thank you @spayurpets for collating this data.
Thanks @ChicagoSportsFn Maybe it would be easier if we can just put an asterisk next to Notre Dame that says:
***Notre Dame ED results may differ for athletes/protestants/non-legacies. Consult your college counselor if you have a painful green erection that lasts more than four years as this may be a sign of a serious Catholic college condition. 
Adding George Washington:
http://gwtoday.gwu.edu/undergraduate-applications-gw-rise-more-28-percent-0
MIT EA 656 out of 7,767 (8.4%) (4776 deferred=61.5%) (2175 rejected=28%)
Stanford REA 745 out of 7822 (9.5%)
Georgetown EA 892 out of 7027 (12.7%) (remainder deferred=87%)
Harvard SCEA 918 out of 6173 (14.9%) (4673 def=75.7%) (464 rej=7.5%)
Yale SCEA: 795 out of 4662 (17.1%) (53% def) (29% rej)
Princeton SCEA 785 out of 4229 (18.6%)
Brown ED 669 out of 3030 (22.1%) (1905 def=62.9%) (456 rej=15.0%)
Penn ED 1335 out of 5762 (23.2%)
Duke ED 813 out of 3455 (23.5%) (1663 def=19.2%)
UVA EA (OOS) 2955 out of 12308 (24.0%) (3005 def=24.4%) (6348 rej=51.6%)
Dartmouth ED 494 out of 1927 (25.6%)
Cornell ED 1338 out of 4882 (27.4%) (1153 def=23.6%) (2391 rej=49.0%)
Georgia Tech EA 4424 out of 14861 (29.8%)
Notre Dame EA 1610 out of 5321 (30.3%) (818 def=15.4%) (2893 rej=54.4%)
Johns Hopkins ED 584 out of 1929 (30.3%)
Boston College EA ~2700 out of 8600 (~31.4%)
Tufts ED ~663 out of 2070 (~32%) (estimated)
Bowdoin College ED 207 out of 614 (33.7%)
Northwestern ED 1061 out of 3022 (35.1%)
Williams College ED 246 out of 585 (42.1%)
Davidson College ED 207 out of 458 (45.2%)
UVA EA (In-State) 2237 out of 4460 (50.2%) (1060 def=23.8%) (1163 rej=26.1%)
University of Georgia ED 7500+ out of 14516 (51%+)
Middlebury College ED 338 out of 636 (53.1%) (74 def=11.6%) (224 rej=35.2%)
George Washington ED: 841 out of 1373 (61.3%)
MIT EA 656 out of 7,767 (8.4%) (4776 deferred=61.5%) (2175 rejected=28%)
Stanford REA 745 out of 7822 (9.5%)
Georgetown EA 892 out of 7027 (12.7%) (remainder deferred=87%)
Harvard SCEA 918 out of 6173 (14.9%) (4673 def=75.7%) (464 rej=7.5%)
Yale SCEA: 795 out of 4662 (17.1%) (53% def) (29% rej)
Princeton SCEA 785 out of 4229 (18.6%)
Brown ED 669 out of 3030 (22.1%) (1905 def=62.9%) (456 rej=15.0%)
Penn ED 1335 out of 5762 (23.2%)
Duke ED 813 out of 3455 (23.5%) (1663 def=19.2%)
UVA EA (OOS) 2955 out of 12308 (24.0%) (3005 def=24.4%) (6348 rej=51.6%)
Dartmouth ED 494 out of 1927 (25.6%)
Cornell ED 1338 out of 4882 (27.4%) (1153 def=23.6%) (2391 rej=49.0%)
Georgia Tech EA 4424 out of 14861 (29.8%)
Notre Dame EA 1610 out of 5321 (30.3%) (818 def=15.4%) (2893 rej=54.4%)
Johns Hopkins ED 584 out of 1929 (30.3%)
Boston College EA ~2700 out of 8600 (~31.4%)
Tufts ED ~663 out of 2070 (~32%) (estimated)
Bowdoin College ED 207 out of 614 (33.7%)
UNC EA 6948 out of 19842 (35.0%)
Northwestern ED 1061 out of 3022 (35.1%)
Williams College ED 246 out of 585 (42.1%)
Davidson College ED 207 out of 458 (45.2%)
UVA EA (In-State) 2237 out of 4460 (50.2%) (1060 def=23.8%) (1163 rej=26.1%)
University of Georgia ED 7500+ out of 14516 (51%+)
Middlebury College ED 338 out of 636 (53.1%) (74 def=11.6%) (224 rej=35.2%)
George Washington ED 841 out of 1373 (61.3%)
@goldenbear2020 I wonder if the numbers for UNC EA In-State are out.
Swarthmore posts some applicant numbers, but not enough for our purposes.
http://swarthmorephoenix.com/2016/02/04/smaller-but-more-diverse-applicant-group-for-class-of-2020/
Good data from Cornell with deferral rate included.
^^ The number reported for Harvard’s early applicants is way off. It was actually 6,173 not 1,972.