@homerdog The Posse numbers are close to set - there are 10 or 11 accepted for each Posse (each partner college has a different number of Posses who attend, Midd has 3), from the 20-25 finalists for each Posse, all who apply ED, so the acceptance rate of those is 40%-55% (though the lower end is extremely rare).
QB-matched ED applicants are accepted at about a 17% rate (another 40% or so are accepted RD), though the numbers matched, and therefore the number accepted ED, change year to year for each college member.
These numbers are counted in the ED applicants and ED acceptances, but the selection process is done separately.
I think that one can get to the numbers of athletes, if the school posts its number of athletes elsewhere. Based on what I have read, NESCAC rules allow 14 recruits for the football team, and two athletes for each other varsity sport, and an extra one for each Div I sport. I think that they gave Amherst and Williams 66 each, and Bowdoin has 75 or so, and Midd would have a similar number as Bowdoin. For Midd, that is 32% of the non-Posse ED admits.
However, those are the number of recruited athletes who have academics which are lower or much lower than the college average. There are likely also athletes among the ED admits with academic above the average and are being accepted at a much higher rate than non-athletes, but are not “officially” recruits. So the number of 40% of the ED admits being athletes, that I remember reading, seems pretty credible.
I saw the same pattern in admission to NU from our HS as well. They were accepting a large percent of applicants until 2017, and then stopped. In all honesty, they were right to do so, since maybe 20% of those who were accepted actually ended up attending NU.
The acceptance rates are still above their average, but not nearly as much. I don’t know about last year, since I do not have access to Naviance any more, of course. The HS also has not published a list of colleges to which students were accepted, and ended up attending, since 2015, which is also not surprising, considering the philosophy of the HS.
I do not know why you would think so. After taking out the recruited athletes, there is no reason that ED applicants will be any way worse than RD applicants. Most of the non-athlete ED applicants are there because they are well-matched to the college. On the other hand, RD applicants include the many applicants who are applying to the college as a high reach.
The only difference is that, with many more applicants, the chance that there is a one-in-a-thousand applicant is higher with 20,000 applicants than it is with 5,000 applicants. There is also a higher diversity, which is good for college “building a diverse class”