I’m trying to figure out why some of the most competitive SLACs (e.g. Bates, Wesleyan) have such comparatively high acceptance rates for ED. Is it really just about yield management? Is it possible that 50%+ are actually athletic recruits? (in which case ED wouldn’t be nearly as strong a bet for a non-recruit)
Forgive me if this has already been dissected ad nauseum in some other thread – I’m new to these parts. 
The ED acceptance rates at theses schools are deceiving because they contain athletic recruits as well as students from programs like QuestBridge and Posse. The result is a large pool of pre-vetted kids who are virtually guaranteed admission. While ED at these schools may provide some advantage it is not the large advantage that one might assume from looking at the acceptance rates.
I don’t have any hard numbers but my guess is that the significant number of those admitted at ED are recruited athletes. I base this on our current experience with S24 being recruited at several SLAC and committing to one, whose entering class is about 25% recruited athletes and this school isn’t particularly sporty. But then again I could be all wet. Inquiring minds want to know.
Your best bet is likely going to be to try to get data on how many students are recruited athletes, and then assume they were almost all ED admits.
So I just googled up a chart which claims maybe something like 39% of Bates is recruited athletes.
Per their latest CDS, they enrolled 518 people, so maybe around 202 were recruited athletes. They admitted 314 people ED, so it looks like up to almost 2/3rds were recruited athletes.
If you then like, you can do some math and you get an estimated 112/455 ED for non-recruited athletes, or 24.6%. Still higher than the non-ED admit rate of 10.8%, but now you have to also account for other hooks, like QuestBridge and so on. And then for likely differences in the frivolous application rate in RD versus ED . . . .
You can see why there may not be much left by the time you are done controlling for all these issues.
No doubt a large number of Wesleyan ED admits are “pre-vetted” athletes, Questbridge admits and returning veterans (fka Posse admits). However, at 3,000 students, the class size at Wesleyan University is nearly twice that of Bates, Amherst, Bowdoin, etc… So, there are many more spaces available for unhooked applicants.
Yeah, this is the math I was just doing. Per this WaPo article (https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/06/12/varsity-athletes-admissions-enrollment-top-colleges/), Wesleyan has a hair fewer varsity athletes than Bates, which is half the size.
I’ll use Wesleyan U as an example to try to figure this out.
I don’t know how many athletes applied in the ED round vs. how many were RD and just walked on… but let’s assume that every single athlete applied and was admitted in the ED round. So – that will be higher than the actual number, almost certainly, but to what degree we cannot know.
There are about 780 varsity athletes at Wesleyan U. (I counted the roster of every team on their sports web site. lol). Let’s call it 195 per class.
In 2022-23, Wes admitted 424 total through the ED round. So if every single athlete went ED, and assuming some Q’bridge/Posse and some other very strongly hooked admits we could be looking at an unhooked ED class of under 200.
So – broadly, maybe just cut the ED rate in half if you don’t have a huge hook.
Thanks – this is exactly what I suspected and does change our approach to early decision strategy (and campus visits – less need to go to Maine and Vermont). Of course, when the varsity badminton recruiters come knocking on our door, we may be singing a different tune. 
Yeah, Wesleyan and Bates have a very similar number of varsity athletes, because they field very similar teams. And so the percentage then becomes a function more of the overall size of the college, and as you note Wesleyan is much bigger.
Again this is making a lot of simplifying assumptions, but if you assume both have around 200 recruited ED applicants/admits a year, you get Bates with like 460 additional ED applicants, Wesleyan like 850. So that’s pretty different in gross terms, although not very inconsistent with their overall size difference.
Bates is then admitting like 110/460, Wesleyan 220/850, so again different gross, not so different relative.
And then overall, Bates got like 8300 applications, Wesleyan 14500, which again is scaling approximately right.
All this is suggesting a couple things. First, Bates and Wesleyan are approximately right-sized for their demand. Second, Bates and Wesleyan have at least broadly similar sorts of admissions adjusted for scale, except for the fact recruited athletes is the one part that doesn’t scale but is more fixed in size.
No big revelations here, but that itself is good to know.
Thanks. I think, according to your figures, Wesleyan is still admitting twice as many un/lesser hooked students in the ED round as a college Bates’ size. Likewise, while it’s entirely possible that all the NESCACs’ ED rates rise and fall in tandem, it is my impression that the total number of ED applicants is apt to be a lot bigger variable than the total number of athletes.
It’s shocking, but tiny schools have about the same number of athletes as giant D1 schools. A football team takes 100 people whether your school is big of small.
There are many references to these numbers, including from an Amherst report and also from a Bowdoin Orient 3-part article. Both of these sources are dated (Bowdoin 2014) and Amherst (2016). But, afaik the numbers and recruiting at both schools (and in the NESCAC conference) still follow this. Bowdoin has moved away from the bands in some sports though.
https://bowdoinorient.com/bonus/article/9151
Generally, for NESCAC schools there are around 70 or so slotted athletes (14 for football, 2 for every other sport), the majority of which apply ED. Amherst calls these ‘athletic factors’. These slot numbers are a league wide ‘rule’.
Then there are athletes who get soft support, Amherst calls them ‘coded athletes’, and that ranges from 60-90 athletes per year ( so likely similar at the other NESCACs). These applicants tend to have high stats, and not all apply ED. We have no idea how many apply ED in any given year.
So to get at a more realistic ED admit numbers for unhooked applicants, you have to make some assumptions and subtract by hooked/advantaged category:
-a high proportion of 70 full support/slot athletes
-a relatively lower proportion of the 60-90 athletic factors/soft support athletes
-Posse students (at schools that participate, e.g., 30 at Middlebury)
-QB students (at schools that participate, assume 12-18 or so per school, I wouldn’t be surprised if this number increases this year)
-Some number of students who attended the fly-in events of these schools (also likely to increase this year)
-Legacy students (where that’s still a hook)
-Development students/faculty kids
-Some number of targeted students from relationships with college access orgs that have a high proportion of URMs and first gens (also likely to increase this year)
What you are left with is the number of unhooked slots. Then divide that by 2 for gender.
A not insignificant proportion of the athletes at these schools are not recruited, they are walk-ons.
When my son was trying to decide on schools, one thing we noted was that (at the schools he was interested in) there were many more freshmen athletes than senior athletes … in other words, a fair number of athletes drop off the teams as they find other interests (and unlike division 1 schools, their financial aid in D3 is not tied to athletic participation). That meant that the total number of athletes in the freshman class was typically significantly larger than 1/4 of the total number of athletes at the school.
Thus leaving even fewer slots for NARPs in ED.
Per @Mwfan1921 's excellent breakdown a few posts back, it looks like many varsity athletes don’t actually ED – or aren’t “preferred” in the ED round if they do go that route. Apparently there are a lot of walk-ons at the D3 LAC level.
However, there are other supremely hooked applicants taking plenty of other spots.
I figure the best guess for an unhooked ED applicant is to cut the ED acceptance rate in half for their purposes. So at Wes, instead of about a 40% chance, you’re looking at more of a 20%ish chance if you’re an average unhooked applicant.
Personally, I don’t think this is really susceptible to a universal formula, including for the reasons discussed above–different SLACs have different portions of recruited athletes, and for that matter different ED situations.
So consider forum-favorite St Olaf. Per their latest CDS, St Olaf admitted 242/334 of ED applicants, which is 72.5%. By the suggested formula, unhooked applicants in ED would be about 36%.
OK, but then also per their CDS, for non-ED they admitted 2874/5190, 55.4%. I am quite confident that means that 36% is likely too low, that unhooked applicants in ED would at least be around the same as that 55.4%, if not higher.
I really think this is a kind of general issue in conservations about ED. The role ED plays at Bates or Wesleyan may be quite different from the role it plays at St Olaf, because these colleges get a very different volume and mix of applicants in the first place. And those differences are likely going to invalidate any sort of general formula.
While some schools may have a fair number of walk-ons, many have very few – as in zero to 2 per team.
For the OP, it depends on the school. The ones in more competitive leagues, such as NESCAC, aren’t filling their rosters with players who showed up for try-outs. In fact, many are recruiting players right down to the last bench-warmer.
The answer is school-dependent, but at pretty much every one of them, there are enough applicants who will have some kind of priority that your odds, as an unhooked applicant, will be significant lower than the “percent admitted ED” would suggest. Some schools come right out and say it’s the same as RD.
Which I am inclined to believe, at least as to their unhooked applicants (I tend to think there is an implied exception at least for recruited athletes). And yet some of those colleges have a big ED versus RD acceptance rate difference, they are just letting us know that is not because of any sort of boost.
That said, some colleges do not say anything like that. Nor, though, do many say it actually helps. And not to be cynical, but since ED is very much in the college’s favor, a strategic silence on this issue might make sense for a lot of colleges regardless of what they know behind the scenes.
Agreed, @NiceUnparticularMan. I tend to think there’s a benefit, even when they say there’s not, by being the first there. They might accept the excellent student from MA who is male, white, FP, and really interested in journalism and acapella. If a similar candidate appears in the RD round, the response is “we’ve already got that.” So yes, the ED candidate got no breaks, BUT did get the first mover advantage.
It’s never quite that simple, and there are indeed schools where the school, knowing you’ll come if they say yes, may cut you a little slack for being in the ED round.
Sure – there is variability among the number and proportion of ED athletes among LACs.
But if an unhooked kid doesn’t want to spend the time doing the math and the guessing, he or she can probably figure on roughly half the likelihood of the overall ED rate. Or, at least, that the chances are probably somewhat lower for unhooked kids.
I agree with this. The one thing we are pretty sure of is that the number of admitted athletes probably holds steady from one year to the next. Everything else depends on how many non-athletes apply during the ED round.