I always find ranking methodology fascinating. WalletHub basically used admitted percentile as 1/2 the weight an SAT/class rank as the other half. So a school with higher SAT scores (since so few schools rank) and fewer apps ends up about even with a school with slightly lower SATs but in a highly desirable location (and so more apps). As a student applicant … the chances for being admitted to the schools are not the same, however. Particularly if you are one gender or another, as @NiceUnparticularMan noted. The admit rate difference between genders in the Vassar common data set is pretty big-- 16% for women; 26% for men. (For people that love stats, I do want to point out that the yield for men and women is roughly the same- 31.5% for women 33% for men. So the issue isn’t converting admits to students, it’s getting male applications in the door.) But the gender imbalance is also present at BU. There it shows up in the 13% admit rate for women and a 16% admit rate for men. (With similar yields as Vassar - 29% for men and 33% for women.)
I don’t think Vassar posted its common data set (CDS) showing the 2023 freshman class. For the 2023 CDS, it shows 32 waitlist students admitted into the class that started in 2022. Which is a fairly good number for a school that size. Vassar kids are guaranteed housing all four years, so they have to be just right with the number of enrolled students.
Yeah, I think outside of tech-focused schools which might go the other way, women might be facing at least a mildly harder standard at a lot of colleges.
Vassar seems pretty far out on the bell curve, however. Brown as well.
EDII pools are comprised of either those who flipped from RD or those that did not get admitted to their EDI which many would see as still very competitive applicants, making the EDII round no easy breezy lap in the pool.
Wow. I didn’t realize it was so few.
As stated by @Midwestmom2022, Vassar admitted 32 students from its waiting list in the most recent year for which CDS information is available. In the prior year, 96 students were admitted. A range such as this may have been influenced by national events, however.
As some examples, the ED2 pool may also include:
– Students who did not have a firm choice as to where they wanted to ED by the ED1 deadline;
– Students who want to show strong first semester grades before applying;
– Students who were anticipating a meaningful accomplishment in the first semester senior year that they wanted to include in the application.
This would be my general expectation of the ED2 pool. However, there may be some that are similar to the ED1 pool. While she did not flip from RD to ED2, middle kid was asked to switch by a coach at an elite LAC. I suspect as an academically qualified kid (NMF, 4.0, 10 APs w/9-5s, 1-4), had she switched to ED2, she would have been admitted. So you may be in the same pool as some kids like that.
Also Wesleyan: 18.5% acceptance rate for men, 12% for women
This whole ED1/ED2 conversation reminds me of a message we saw last week from a Wes message board: “Congratulations to the Wes class of 2028 for submitting their ED applications to Brown!” Some real “I’m in this post, and I don’t like it” energy from my kid when they saw that. 
BTW @NiceUnparticularMan I saw something just now that I thought somewhat interesting. When we run the numbers on acceptance rates and yield for ED and RD, we usually assume that “all” or “pretty much all” ED admits yield.
Saw this for Rice and it struck me:
Note that over 3% of ED admits did not yield. Not sure if this is representative of anywhere other than Rice, though it may be? I would have assumed the # of non-yield ED admits (much) closer to zero than 16. I guess not.
BTW: the NYT just recently ran a piece about gender imbalance in admissions. Gift link:
I would argue that 97% is “pretty much all.” There could be a few that will drop out for financial reasons—I’ve heard that certain types of income (farm, for example) doesn’t predict accurately in the aid calculators. Do you suppose that number includes kids that take a gap year? Technically, they aren’t enrolled at the University.
Yup maybe a distinction without a difference. I guess I was just surprised at the magnitude and thought it’d be smaller. Financial was my assumption for all of them. But I suppose gap year kids could be in there as well.
Anecdotally, I see a decent number of people online who seem to have EDed first, asked if they could actually afford it second. And then things happen where people don’t enroll at all. To be honest, that is still a bit higher than I would have expected anyway for a college like Rice, but probably not outside of what that sort of thing can explain.
I guess what this means is that a slightly higher percentage of enrollees at these colleges are RD admits than is commonly estimated. Similarly the RD yield is a bit higher than is commonly estimated.
Like in this case, if you had estimated it was only 639 RD enrollees, you would have gotten 56.8% of their enrolled class being RD admits, and a 32.6% RD yield rate (sidenote–that is really good! Rice’s focus on people really actually understanding and being a good fit for Rice seems to be working for it).
But apparently it is actually 58.2% of their enrolled class being RD admits, and a 33.4% RD yield rate (even better). Not huge differences, but still, something to be aware of.
Must make for a “fun” conversation when the time comes.
Philosophically, I am realizing the Common App and fee waivers and such have made it very easy for people to do things when applying that may not make much sense for them.
And while I knew about NPCs long before S24 even started looking at a college list, obviously other people are coming out of social circles where that tool is actually news to them after they are applying.
And to be fair, international applicants often don’t have anything equivalent anyway.
The CDS supports that. (it’s harder for women to get into Vassar than men).
For 22-23, these were the admit rates by sex:
Men: 25.8% (848/3283)
Women: 15.8% (1281/8129)
Anybody know stats on Syracuse ED 2? It’s really hard to find stats…
It is all blurring together, but I think I might have noticed that first in the CDS, then S24 started looking up more information online, and it all became very well-confirmed in our minds. I’ve told him not to get overly confident about what that means for him, but still, I think he is not wrong about it being a somewhat better bet for him (which doesn’t make me feel great but it is what it is).
Edit: By the way, for whatever reason there is zero data in SCOIR for our HS and Vassar. There are other colleges where I know people have applied and enrolled that have no data (including S24’s REA school–he seems to have a talent for identifying such colleges). But from the matriculation lists it also appears none of our kids have gone to Vassar back through the class of 2013 (despite Northeast LACs generally being popular), which is the oldest list.
Kinda strange to me, but I would definitely not mind if S24 broke the streak.
How about Wes – does your school send kids there? Wes and Vassar are similar schools which seem to attract similar types of applicants in terms of general interests and academic ability. Probably a lot of kids apply to both, and they are similarly selective.
IE, maybe you could use Wes stats as a proxy for Vassar.
So Wesleyan is one of the colleges where we send a mix of recruited athletes and not-recruited athletes.
We have three data points in S24’s part of the chart, all RD, with two accepted and one waitlisted (outcome unknown). So that seems promising, although as usual not a lock.
Interestingly, there is then a very noticeable zone where there are no acceptances and just rejections and waitlists. And then there are three more acceptances all kind of off on their own with not so great test scores but pretty good grades. Definitely feels like hooked kids to me, but I wonder if it says something informative about Wesleyan’s approach to our HS that there appears to be a sharp line for grades (all the kids with similar test scores but not as good grades were rejected, not even a single waitlisting).
Anyway, first, thank you for the suggestion! Second, this seems promising for my dreams of being a Vassar Dad, although as usual the data is so sparse it really only gets you so far.