- The number of RD applications far exceeds that of ED applications for all schools, even the most selective. Filling its class with only ED applicants would greatly reduced the total number of applications, making the college appear less "prestigious".
- Some of the most qualified applicants won't apply ED. They want to be able to compare their acceptances in depth and make their more informed decisions in April.
- Generally speaking, the ED class is not as well qualified as the RD class for most schools. A school has to make a decision on an ED applicant without seeing the majority of applications and comparing the applicant with vast number of other would-be applicants.
- Bad optics. The school would face severe criticism if it were to fill its entire class with only ED applicants.
@makemesmart You also need to correct for the 40% or so of ED admit who are recruited athletes, so the actual acceptance rates of non-athlete ED applicants are lower than the ones seen here. You sometimes have to also figure in Posse and QB applicants, as well, since their process is different.
@data10 I agree that the info in my post only goes for our high school. But that was my point. Find out what goes on at your high school. I really believe that’s where kids can figure out their best chances. (For example, we have a lower admit rate for ED at NU because we are 45 minutes from Evanston and NU stopped taking a larger percentage of our kids three years ago. We used to have 20-25 admitted and it’s been single digits since 2015. It’s a flat out decision by NU to take fewer kids from the Chicago suburbs and diversify more.)
All of these kids on CC who ask to be “chanced” need to look at what happens at their school. Kids with similar grades, rigor, ECs will get totally different results. Do you go to a private school that’s a feeder to Ivies? Which elite schools seem to “like” the kids at your school or where do your GC’s have relationships?
@MWolf Wouldn’t it be great if schools published the number of athletes and legacies admitted in ED. We can get the Questbridge and Posse numbers I think. And we can see the totals. I think, for LACs especially, if they published the athlete and legacy numbers, fewer kids would bother with ED. They’d see that the acceptance rate for unhooked just isn’t that much better than RD.
@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”
I’d like to see some actual data on that assertion.
My point was the previous post content was too little information to draw conclusions about strength of ED boost. The same is true for drawing conclusions at both the HS level and the national level.
As I’ve stated in other posts, I believe the HS feeder or other special connection influence is often overestimated, and instead when HSs have a large number of admits that large number primarily relates to some combination of a huge number of applicants, a high rate of hooked students among those many applicants, and a high rate of especially well qualified students among those many applicants, often due to the HS being highly selective.
This relates to my earlier comment about needing more information about such factors to separate influences from ED from differences in number of applicants, rate of hooks, and rate of highly qualified applicants. For example, suppose a particular HS had several ED acceptances and 0 RD acceptances. If those ED acceptances all were hooked students, then it says very little about the relative preference between ED and RD. However, it may be suggestive of a preference for hooked students, if there were many unhooked applicants with similar or greater qualifications , and few similarly qualified hooked students in the RD pool.
@data10 exactly. We can look at the data from our school and see how many kids got into, say, Duke. S19 knows the kids. Knows their rigor and their grades and their scores. Everyone shares. Obviously knows if they are URM which is almost never the case at our school. So we do see patterns. Duke did take unhooked kids last year in ED. So did Wash U. Vanderbilt did not. Northwestern did not. Dartmouth did not. Princeton did not. Brown did not. Georgetown did not. Schools have been pretty consistent over the last few years as to who they accept in ED. Applying to most elite schools ED from our high schools is a wasted ED.
Basically, Ivies take only athletes or legacies from our school. Our high school wins state in multiple sports each year so Ivies know they can dip in and get themselves full pay, bright athletes here. They take those and don’t take anyone else. Being a student athlete at our school is the best way to get into an elite school. Recruited athletes many times know they are being recruited and tell other kids and that can even affect where the non athletes apply. Two athletes recruited to Cornell? No one else will probably bother with ED or even RD. Stinks but that’s what’s been happening.
One can look at the overall acceptance rates but it’s the acceptance rates from your high school that can paint the clearest picture.
Too late to change my last post. I meant to say that applying ED as an unhooked applicant to an elite school is usually a wasted ED. If you’re hooked in some way then it’s the way to go.
Also remember that most recruited athletes have already had positive pre-reads before they submit their applications. Iow, they have already been screened to be admits. If these were the only ones in the pool, the ED rate would be 100%. Some schools do a version of this with the kids of major donors as well.
There are LOTS of athletes who are advised not to apply and they go off looking for another school. So at the risk of being repetitive, these students who would not be admitted don’t get into the pool.
As for history with various high schools, I recall that kids in my son’s class were grumbling about an Ivy that "capped " acceptances from our school at 4 (with additional grumbling about how certain kids were going to grab those spots because of I don’t recall what.) 6 were accepted.
I think stories like @homerdog 's illustrate 2 things. Those unis consider the students from that high school adequately prepared AND it is extremely hard for unhooked kids (especially ones that share the demographics of athletes,
legacies, development cases) to get in period. They are not shutting them out because of the high school. It is frustrating, for sure.
Brantly:
I happen to know that this school does not generally offer merit scholarships, although they do have a few…doubt she’ll get one of them, but other schools do offer merit and I thought it was best to see all her options rather than getting locked in at full price. However, it made me nervous to think that her dream school was going to be out of reach before they even read her application (because we didn’t apply ED).