College Admissions Statistics Class of 2021: Early and Regular Decision Acceptance Rates

@PurpleTitan ftw…

Circling back to the topic/purpose of this thread, @spayurpets, aided by various others, is doing the community a great service in compiling these statistics in order for us to be able to compare these schools on an apples-to-apples basis as much as possible.

I think we can agree that schools that don’t disclose, at minimum, numbers of apps and admit rates for all of their various admissions categories make these comparisons much harder, and cause observers to wonder - justifiably - what they’re hiding.

Sophisticated CC members, faced with incomplete disclosure, can make reasonable assumptions based on disclosures from comparable schools, run the numbers and conclude, for example, that an applicant will get a massive advantage applying ED somewhere while applying RD there is likely to be a waste of time and money. Unfortunately, most applicants don’t have the experience to make that kind of judgment, and schools that make incomplete disclosures aren’t helping them.

@DeepBlue86: Indeed. My cynical view is that a lot of it is marketing and impressing the gullible.

@PurpleTitan highly doubt most non-SCEA ivies will adopt EA/ED1/ED2. Columbia and Penn definitely won’t. ED works very well for them and there are no substantial advantages to the EA/ED1/ED2 scheme, if anything it just comes across as gimmicky.
In fact I believe Chicago has made a mistake with its change to EA/ED1/ED2. I wonder how many kids will apply RD to Chicago next year after seeing the 2% RD acceptance and about 75% of the class getting in early.

And while early apps will go up I don’t think they will be enough to offset the RD decrease.

Stanford is an FBS school. (no other selective school is an FBS school outside of Berkeley and Duke). with an athletic dept that has won more national individual and team NCAA championships than any other school… including 3 from last year - 27 medals 14 gold at Rio (the most again) with a student body less than a quarter of the size of its athletic peers (USC, UCLA, BERKELEY, TEXAS, OHIO STATE, MICHIGAN, ALABAMA).

Athletes will pull down SAT scores (and this is true of other selective schools as well). Stanford if it decided to… could fill its entire class with students with perfect SATS. The Stanford applicant pool and student body is a different beast in that respect.

Caltech has the highest SAT scores in the country and pays the least attention to sports. U of Chicago I would argue the same for that matter.

U of Chicago is taking the yield game to the next level…

If one of the SCEA schools switched to ED the others would be forced to switch… that’s game theory… Just like Harvard had to reinstate EA because its yield dropped when it went with RD only and the others didn’t follow.

Every selective school practices this yield game at some level except for MIT.

@sbballer: Hello?
Northwestern is also in FBS.
For that matter, so are Rice, ND, Vandy, UVa, and UMich.

@sbballer - this thread has nothing to do with how many sports championships and gold medals Stanford and its students have won.

I for one will be very interested to hear - on another thread - if you’re fortunate enough to be admitted to Stanford when the time comes, and what you think of it after you’ve spent some time there.

Here are a couple of admission stats that highlight the state of college admissions today and why things are so challenging for students and families.

Vanderbilt CDS 2006-2007: ACT Middle 50% Range = 28-32

Vanderbilt 2017 ED: ACT Middle 50% Range = 33-34

Vanderbilt 2017 RD: ACT Middle 50% Range = 33-35

https://virg.vanderbilt.edu/virgweb/CDSC.aspx?year=2006

https://admissions.vanderbilt.edu/vandybloggers/2017/03/class-of-2021-regular-decision-summary-statistics/

https://admissions.vanderbilt.edu/vandybloggers/2017/03/class-of-2021-regular-decision-summary-statistics/

Comparing FBS school admissions with non FBS schools are a different ballgame. Stanford is an FBS school… HYP, MIT,Amherst are not.

U of Chicago is no more of a ploy to increase yield than what HYP admitting 1/2 the class SCEA does. U of Chicago probably made the decision to go for yield after maxing out on boosting apps. Their yield will go up substantially obviously.

I predict more selective schools will go ED and will admit a greater percentage of their students ED to boost yield.

@spayurpets: at the Ivies, I understand that the vast majority of the recruited athletes are admitted SCEA/ED and therefore count in those statistics. This is why one has to back them out in order to calculate what the true odds are for unhooked applicants. Do you know if it’s the same at the peer schools, or do some schools admit athletes RD after giving them likely letters? Obviously, if close to 200 athletes are being admitted RD instead of early, you’d have to adjust for this in order to make apples-to-apples comparisons of what proportion of the class is being admitted early.

Any idea if the admissions tats to Georgetown’s College of Foreign Service are tighter than the university’s overall admission acceptance rate?

yes. FS is harder to get in.

No, that’s wrong. Georgetown actually broke out the different schools in their article: http://www.thehoya.com/georgetown-acceptance-rate-hits-record-low/ and it appears that it was slightly easier to get into any of the individual schools than the college.

[quote]
Georgetown College, the School of Foreign Service and the School of Nursing and Health Studies all saw increased number of applications.

The College had a pool of 12,920 applicants, compared to 11,674 applicants last year with 1,883 applicants for an acceptance rate of 14.6 percent.

The SFS saw 3,994 applications, up from 3,792 last year and accepted 666 applicants at a rate of 16.7 percent.

The NHS had 1,268 applicants, up from 1,227 applicants last year and saw an acceptance rate of 17.8 percent with 226 students accepted.

The McDonough School of Business saw a slight decline in application numbers, with a pool of 3,283 compared to last year’s pool of 3,304. The MSB accepted 538, or 16.4 percent of applicants.

Thanks for that @spayurpets. I’m guessing that SFS might be little harder for the general public in having to go against children of alums who are ambassadors, etc. Hate to ask again, but will you be having Harvey Mudd stats? Thanks!

@hzhao2004 MIT is a different play and sector specific together with Caltech .

These are the clubs for undergraduate –

  1. H and S
  2. P
  3. Y and UChicago

As overall Universities: S, H, UChicago, Berkeley, Columbia, Princeton and Yale. Again – excluding MIT and Caltech

@tintininamerica I have not found anything for Harvey Mudd or any of the Claremont colleges this spring. Last year, HMC and Scripps released some stats on April 8, so maybe soon there’ll be something.

@DeepBlue86

I assume that all recruited athletes are admitted early and not RD. For NCAA sports, they have national signing day, prior to the RD day, so the student-athletes all have been accepted by that point.

While athletes do muddy the water a bit with the statistics, its not so easy to just subtract them out. Most schools don’t tell you exactly how many athletes are in each class, and it differs from Ivy League to DI to NESCAC, or even between each school. I think I read somewhere that NESCAC schools take 2 students per varsity sport and 14 for football, so each school differs a bit in how many teams they field every year. Bowdoin, as a result, has more athletes than Amherst. And who knows how many students are not “recruited” per se but get some extra consideration because the Athletic Department flagged them as varsity level walk-ons. To take a rough guess, I would say that DIII schools take about 75-100 recruited athletes each year and DI schools take around double that.

George Washington:

Thanks, @spayurpets. I hear you on the difficulty of making the adjustments. I doubt it’s worth the effort unless it’s obvious that some schools are accepting athletes RD rather than ED. In that sense, I guess the question is which round the athletes are counted in.