go to athletes. D is a junior and she’s thinking that Bucknell might be her first choice right now. She has no hooks. I woudld hate for her to waste an ED application if the odds aren’t great. I think her stats will be fine, but she won’t be off the charts.
Bucknell has a fairly high ED admit rate. 60%+
And Bucknell is bigger than a typical lac, so athletes are a factor, but not as much as a factor at a smaller school. There is definitely a bit of an ED bump at Bucknell
@wisteria100 Thank you. I read somewhere below that last year 220 of the ED spots went to recruited athletes and they accepted 300 in total for ED 1, so unless I read the post wrong, that sounds like a small amt of non athlete spots.
There is an article on the Bucknell website, that says applying ED does give an applicant a greater chance of acceptance.
I know someone who was admitted ED to Bucknell this December who is neither a recruited athlete nor “hooked” in any way. She is a white middle-class girl, with no family connection to Bucknell, who will be receiving some financial aid from Bucknell.
If Bucknell is a favorite, if you are a realistic candidate, if you are not looking for merit aid somewhere, and if you would attend Bucknell with no regrets if accepted, by all means give yourself any advantage there might be, whether large or small, by applying ED.
I recommend also applying EA to a safer choice that you also like. That way, if you are deferred or rejected from Bucknell, it will not sting as much nor be as scary, because you will have another acceptance and know you will be going to college!
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According to the Common Data Set (on Bucknell’s website) for the class entering in the fall of 2016, about 440 of the 940 freshman were ED applications. The CDS does not distinguish between recruited athletes and regular applications, but as a small D1 school, Bucknell has historically reported accepting 200-240 recruited athletes. Some recruits apply ED, others do not. My college counselor seems to know Bucknell well and says there are generally about 200-300 spaces open for RD, non-recruits. That is why it is much harder to get into a school like Bucknell in the regular round.
To put it in perspective, Bucknell has 24 Varsity teams…so it makes sense that a lot of spaces are filled with recruits…not to say that the recruits don’t have the same academic qualifications because many do, but that information is not published by most (if any) schools.
I know several kids who got into Bucknell ED and who were not recruited athletes. I think they would have been desirable to many schools (although none had discovered a cure for cancer)… My sense was that if you were a strong applicant and Bucknell was your first choice, you had a good shot. Definitely better than at many of the uber competitive D3 LACs. That is, of course, based solely on kids I know.
If it’s her first choice, I would say go for it!
Thank you all so much for your responses.