Thank you for this update! I was curious about the admit rate. We didn’t attend this weekend (although my junior was giving tours of the Hurt Hub!) – as my incoming kid has been to campus several times over the past 3 years. Just booked our flights for August move-in!
Is your DS going to sign up for an Odyssey session? They sound like a lot of fun. My DS registered for the first Outdoor Odyssey in July.
No, he wasn’t interested, even though I recommended it (I did one at my college back in the day). He’s going to work as a camp counselor this summer, so he couldn’t get away in the middle of summer and he wants time off with friends at the end of summer to go hang at the beach (we are in San Diego).
Understood. We’re in the Los Angeles area. We’ll see you in August! 
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Not uniquely an issue to Davidson, but ED is out of control. That’s 2/3 of the slots locked up before regular decision. There are good reasons for students not to be pressured to commit early and it’s too bad that schools are punishing kids who don’t.
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Agreed. Davidson is somewhat unique for its size/profile in that it is a D1 school. 34% of the ED slots went to athletes. Another 14% went to QuestBridge and Posse. That tells me that an unhooked applicant has an almost identical chance of getting in via ED or RD (assuming that there are significantly more applicants admitted during the RD round based on projected yield). I expect ED will continue to grow as it benefits schools. It will be interesting to see if it becomes a thing in graduate school admissions.
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I doubt the ED acceptance rate sans the athletes, QuestBridge and Posse Scholars is “almost identical” to RD admit rates, unless there’s an unusual aberation in this year’s ED proportion. It’s certainly not true of last’s year’s applicants or this year’s if you extrapolate the data.
Using the same 15% applicant growth quoted by the school above to ED applicants, there were likely ballpark +/- 932 ED applicants this year (last year there were 810). Excluding athletes, QuestBridge and Posse, that means there were ~767 remaining applicants competing for ~177 remaining slots, which is a 23% admit rate, versus the quoted 14.5% overall, suggesting the RD rate had to be way <14%. We’ve had to know the number of ED applicants denied vs deferred to compute it exactly. But for the sake of argument, even if Davidson denied every ED applicant who didn’t get admitted, and deferred none, it would still be an RD admit rate of ~11.3%. It’s likely lower since they likely deferred many.
Contrary to what some colleges say, it’s usually the case that even after according for hooks there is meaningful admission advantage to ED. But that’s not really the issue. All the students at Davidson are accomplished and overcame long odds for admission.
The point is that giving so many slots to ED and leaving so few for RD is really unfair to students. For one, it systemically advantages the affluent who can commit before fully understanding the comparative COA of their alternatives and therefore how affordable the ED option is. Second, contrary to the original principal that you should only apply ED if it is your dream school, it pressures students to make compromises in their applicant priorities before they know if they might have gotten into their dream schools. Third, it’s an extremely one-sided proposition – the college is forcing students to commit to them with no guidance on whether the college will commit back, potentially losing the opportunity to commit to colleges that would have.
It’s not surprising, but disappointing mercenary for these non-profits whose institutional priority is supposed to be helping students.
Again, not a specific slam on Davidson. A great school (I have a student there). This is happening all the way to the Ivy League. Doesn’t make it right.
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