<p>Detailed informations are on the Williams Record:
<a href="http://www.williamsrecord.com/wr/?view=article§ion=news&id=8441%5B/url%5D">http://www.williamsrecord.com/wr/?view=article§ion=news&id=8441</a>
According to the report, Sat scores are almost same as those of previous year. There were 47 legacies, 42 athletes, and nine Quest Bridge applicants among 216 admitted students, which means only 108 slots were left for 433 "regular" applicants...</p>
<p>I'm not sure exactly how you reached the conclusion that that would only leave 108 slots for "regular" applicants. Regardless of how many slots are left for the RD applicants, however, RD applicants should know that the number of acceptances in the RD round will exceed the number of remaining slots, since the yield won't be anywhere close to 100% in the RD round. That's a little more encouraging to those applicants.</p>
<p>I'm sorry to cause confusion. By "regular" applicants, I meant those who were not legacies, atheles, or Quest Bridge applicants.
In addition, 108 slots were slots remained for "regular" early applicants.
For regular decision applicants, there might be more than 800 slots left.</p>
<p>Thanks for the clarification. I wonder, though, about the overlap of categories. If my son is admitted next year, he'll probably fit both the legacy and athlete categories.</p>
<p>Under the new policy, an tipped athlete who is also a legacy is counted in the number of tipped athletes. That said, you should take heart in the fact that the acceptance rate for children of alums at Williams hovers around 50 percent. So he will get an ENORMOUS boost in the process regardless of his athletic prowess.</p>
<p>Getting a little off topic here, but . . . . So, are you saying that the number of athletes cited in the article represents only "tipped" ones? I'm just curious about how this all works. My son is academically qualified to be admitted (assuming he keeps up the current pace this year), so he shouldn't need a "tip" in the sense of a lowering of the academic standards to get him in, although of course, even kids with great stats, etc., can always use some help. I bet a coach would rather have a player count as a legacy so as not to use up a valuable "tip."</p>
<p>I apologize. My last e-mail was unclear. Before the changes in admissions policy in 2003 (or whatever year it was), a student with sub-par academic qualifications who happened to be a legacy would NOT be counted as a tipped athlete, if he or she were recruited by a coach. In other words, the 72 tipped athletes were comprised only of non-legacy students. Legacies fell into an entirely different category.</p>
<p>After changes were implemented, the 66 tipped athletes incluyded both legacies and non-legacies. The goal was to reduce the "athletic feel" of the campus by shrinking the numbers of athletes in the student body.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that most Williams applicants are "qualified" by Williams' standards. SAT scores of enrolling students differ from SAT scores of all applicants by only 10-20 points. If your son is a good athlete and good student, he may fall into the category of "protects." His legacy status will also provide a big boost. I'd venture a guess that virtually all legacy students with average or above average stats (by Williams' standards) are admitted.</p>
<p>NCEPH:</p>
<p>In all likelihood, the coaches will roll the dice and hope your son is admitted without a "tip" or a "protect". As a practical matter, they prefer to save their allotments for use on athletes who would not otherwise be admitted. He would still appear on the list of 150 or so recruited athletes in each freshman class (likely 4-year varsity athletes), but not the list of 66 tips or 36 "protects".</p>
<p>They would only use a tip or protect on an academically qualified legacy if the athlete were projected to be a top "impact player" on each team...like a top nationally ranked junior tennis player, Olympic caliber swimmer, etc.</p>
<p>Thanks, interesteddad and mikeyd -- I guess I was mostly just curious what the ED numbers meant, when they listed the number of legacies and athletes. So, then do the ED athletes include both "tips" and "protects" with no overlap of legacy? </p>
<p>It makes sense to me that the coaches would want to, as you say, "roll the dice" and hope that a qualified legacy athlete would get in on those criteria and not have to use the valuable "tips" or "protects."</p>
<p>(and you surmise correctly that my son would not be an "impact" player.)</p>
<p>As I understand it, the lowest acceptable SAT score for a low band(C-D) tipped athlete applying to Williams is in the 1250-1320/1600 range</p>
<p>hey this is off topic, but i was wondering how perfect SAT scores fare at williams? as in does anyone know how many 2400s they rejected last year?</p>
<p>NCEPH.. The article meant to say that 42 of the 66 "tips" were accepted early</p>
<p>MikeyD:</p>
<p>That's not surprising. The last thing the athletic dept wants to do is throw away a "tip" on a kid who doesn't end up enrolling at Williams. They want 100% yield from those tips. I imagine a lot of conversations like:</p>
<p>"Listen, if I can pull some strings and get you accepted, are you committed to enrolling at Williams?"</p>
<p>"I think I can get you accepted, but I need you to apply Early Decision, OK?"</p>
<p>For the most part, these are 66 kids who have no prayer of getting accepted without the coach's tip (they range from barely average academics to sub-standard), so applying early is no problem. It's a convenient "letter of intent" for Div. III schools that aren't allowed to have letter of intent.</p>
<p>Mom of 2: I think there's some "play" in those numbers. Lower SAT scores can be offset by higher grades in the definition for each band. It is hard to say what kind of monkey business goes on with grades for the tips coming from junior hockey teams rather than high schools or prep schools. Likewise, there's room for shenanigans in some of the "extra-year" programs at the sports feeder prep schools. Actually, I would guess that many of the tips have high SATs and crappy underperforming grades.</p>
<p>Whatever the details, it's certainly a higher standard than Div I. You won't find athletic recruits at Williams who are functionally illiterate like you will at some Div I programs.</p>
<p>The Div III coaches say that the Ivy League programs will dip a lower in the barrel. The bigger size of these schools makes it easier to bury stuff in the admissions noise, unlike at Williams were you can run afoul of indignant alumni if you push it too far.</p>
<p>Just for the record, quite aside from how it was handled in the article, there is quite a bit of overlap between the legacies and the recruited athletes. Many of the legacies' Williams parents and grandparents were Williams athletes, too, so that's not surprising. I would say that a significant portion, perhaps as many as the majority, of the legacies appear to be recruited athletes. By "recruited athletes" I mean all of them: whether protects, tips, or those the coaches said they wanted ("supported") but didn't use a tip or protect on. I don't know the stats of many of the individual athletes who were admitted Early Decision last month (and so I can't figure out which of the categories a lot of them would fall into), but I know that at least several of the legacy athletes cannot be "tips" and probably aren't even "protects" since their academic stats are in the top 25% band and they have national academic and other awards. I'm just guessing but I think that quite a lot of the legacy/athlete admitted students had very strong academic records. </p>
<p>Just looking at the percentage of legacy applicants who are admitted, it seems as though being a legacy gives an applicant an astronomically large boost but I think the percentages are deceptive. The college offers evaluative/counseling interviews to legacy applicants and helps steer those who don't have the qualifications towards better fits, leaving a narrowed pool of legacy applicants. And the parents often watch the admissions stats over a course of years and have a relatively clear idea of their children's chances when the time comes. An awful lot of those remaining in the pool, but not all of them, then get in.</p>
<p>I don't think there is a big overlap between recruited athletes who are tips and protects, and legacy applicants. Most legacy applicants have higher than average stats, and don't need a tip (like nceph's son above). The impact recruits that I'm aware of over the last few years in the high profile men's sports are not legacy.</p>
<p>I think we actually agree. </p>
<p>What I was trying to say was that a lot of the legacies are athletes (but there are so many athletes that I don't guess you'd say that a lot of the athletes are legacies). And I wouldn't be surprised if many of those athlete/legacies did not need a tip or a protect because they had high academic stats (the ones whose stats I know fall into this category, but, as I said, I only know the stats of a few of them) -- they are still considered recruited atletes even if they are not in the 66 tips or the however-many protects.</p>
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<p>I guess that's what I was really trying to ascertain - whether the number of athletes in the article was just tips, tips plus protects minus legacies, or some other more inclusive category.</p>
<p>I agree with MikeyD - the 42 athletes mentioned are just "tips".</p>
<p>Agree.</p>
<p>I'm thinking it must be tips. Look at how those 42 are spread out over thirty some sports (I know that most teams -- football, ice hockey, and a few others aside -- get about one tip, at most, and that they all encourage their top recruits to apply ED). From what my daughter says about the Facebook group, there are more than 42 accepted EDers who identify themselves as serious athletes who will play at Williams next year and seem to have been in serious contact with the Williams coaches (and the Facebook group contains only about half or fewer of the admitted ED group, meaning that the number of athletes in the Facebook group is probably considerably smaller than the actual total number of group of athletes admitted ED). Another thing that makes me think that the 42 is only tips is that there are some athletes who have been recruited to play more than one sport so 42 and 30 something seem very low for the totals of all admitted recruited athletes and their sports. </p>
<p>I was puzzling over this and why Nesbitt would word it the way he seems to have when talking to the Record reporter. I concluded that, while there are a lot more than 42 recruited athletes (but who are not tips or protects, so no significant dipping, if any, of academic standards), he was being careful not to make it look as though Williams had violated its self-imposed, NESCAC-driven cap on 66 tips.</p>
<p>The confusion does not stem from Nesbitt, but from the individual who composed the article.</p>
<p>Note that the article also mentions the average SAT scores for the "applicant pool." I believe that the SAT scores mentioned are for admitted students. I would be surprised if the SAT scores of the applicant pool are that high.</p>