I had a chance to visit Trinity a few years back. I thought that it was a beautiful campus.
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I thought the campus was very appealing in a visit last year. And the soccer field placement right in the Green in the center of campus must make for a fun game atmosphere.
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I believe Conn is one of a very few schools that offer a degree in Botany.
In terms of what specific schools are known for, Colby has exceptional Environment Studies. They also own a number of venues for research (for the hardy!)
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âAmherst, Wesleyan and Williamsâ were mentioned in the NYT today:
As well as an opinion piece written by a Bates professor:
(Not intending to start a discussion about race; merely pointing out the continued relevance of NESCAC colleges in todayâs society.)
Of note:
After affirmative action ruling, how will colleges seek racial diversity? - The Washington Post
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At our school âNo, no, no, yesâ happens all the time!
Just one example from this cycle at our school (all RD):
Rejected: Columbia, Yale, Dartmouth, Duke, Tufts, Williams
Waitlisted: UVA, Cornell, Amherst, BU, Northeastern
Accepted: NYU
I would put NYU in the same selectivity category as 3-4 of those other schools.
Shotgunning often works.
I suppose it depends on how you divide it up, and also what a school-specific history indicated.
Off hand, being somewhat familiar with our schoolâs acceptance patterns, I would think of 8 of those as materially more selective than NYU for most of our unhooked applicants (Yale, Columbia, Duke, Dartmouth, Cornell, Amherst, Williams, and UVA if it is out of state). And since this applicant go admitted to none of those 8 schools, that again suggests to me at least quite a bit of dependence.
Iâd then think of Tufts as around the same for our typical applicants, and BU and Northeastern as less selective. If this is a complete list, that sort of sounds to me like a 2 likelies, 2 targets, and 8 reaches sort of list, with an admission to one of the targets. Those are some pretty selective likelies, though, and it turned out both were waitlists, so maybe the list omitted actual likelies.
I also note the theory in question depends on applying to the first 2-3 you like best, and by assumption fit you the best, in a given category. But if, say, this applicant preferred both BU and Northeastern to NYU and thought they were better fits, but included NYU out of caution in case they were not accepted to either BU or Northeastern, then I agree that would be an interesting case.
If instead it was the other way around, and they preferred NYU to at least one of BU and Northeastern, then this would really support the observation that at least one of those applications to BU and Northeastern, and possibly both, was unnecessary.
But again, I should stress our counselors do not actively discourage people from doing 4-5 in a range, and neither would I.
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I agree with your handicapping of the tiers of selectivity, which if applied actually demonstrates dependent probabilities contrary to @cocomokes opinion that this is a demonstration of independent probabilities as the accept school, NYU is at the same tier as the WL schools. The outlier is Tufts, although Tufts has a reputation of being very yield management conscious and gives a big boost to ED applicants. Here the applicant(s) were RD so yield management could have easily come into play.
Oh I definitely donât think thereâs independent probability! Just that Iâve seen enough examples of hitting one and only one that I am more in the shotgun camp than I was prepandemic.
Curious why you donât think UVA is in same tier as NYU. UVA had a 12% acceptance rate OOS this year. (NYUâs was 8%). Iâd even argue Cornell is potentially in same tier (19% for ED; 8% overall).
Just based on what our school-based data says. Acceptance rates are funny because it depends on the applicant pool, and sometimes lower acceptance rates seem more a function of a higher volume of uncompetitive applicants, but that doesnât necessarily mean anything about the odds for a competitive individual applicant.
Just to supplement, NYU apparently got 100,662 (!) applicants in the latest Common Data Set cycle. Cornell got 71,164. And very likely the Cornell applicant pool is not just a representative subset of the NYU pool, because that is so many additional NYU applicants it is a good bet the distribution of NYU applicants was skewed a bit less competitive in the less competitive side of the distribution.
OK, then Cornell admitted 7.3% of theirs (5,168 to be exact), NYU 12.5% of theirs (12,539). And so I think it is quite likely many individuals who were in the less competitive side of the NYU admit distribution could not have gotten into the Cornell admit pool that year. Which is consistent with our school data.
UVAâs Common Data Set for that year isnât up yet, but it looks like its OOS applicants for that year were only on the order of 37,000. So now we definitely cannot assume that is a representative subset of the NYU pool. They apparently admitted about 5,600, which is 15%, which is a bit higher than NYUâs raw acceptance rate. But since the pool was nearly a third of the size, it certainly isnât inconsistent with data indicating marginal UVA admits might skew somewhat more competitive than marginal NYU admits.
Thatâs a good point. I guess maybe if Tufts is in the top 2-3 of your Targets, that is maybe a reason to go out to at least 3-4 rather than 2-3 in that category, on the theory that you might fail to communicate adequately to Tufts it really is a top choice for you, and they may inadvertently reject you for yield protection reasons when you would happily have gone there over the school where you ended up.
I think the general idea behind this approach is you will take the time to demonstrate interest and such (if considered) for any school that makes your relatively short list, write very thoughtful individualized essays, and so on. But still, there is a latent risk of miscommunication of interest.
Good pointsâŠTo further complicate things, NYU has both ED1 and ED2 - unlike Cornell. So RD acceptance rate at NYU is likely much lower than Cornellâs.
For this years kids (class of 2027), NYU got 120,000 apps! They donât disclose how much of the class they fill in their 2 ED rounds, but you can assume RD rates are extremely low.
It is too bad they are not more open about applicant statistics and what sorts of admit percentages are associated with different combinations of applicant characteristics plus EA/ED status. I guess I understand why they may not want to undermine their holistic review messaging, but it still seems to me like all the guessing at what is happening is causing a lot of avoidable anxiety, and possibly suboptimal application strategies.
Or maybe the process is just more organic than we think it is. Every year is going to be a little different than the one that preceded it. Too different to yield an accurate morning line at the starting gate, as it were.
Unfortunately, a lot of schools donât share how many students they accept during ED. Often it is 50% or more of the class. I read somewhere that Tulane only accepted a few hundred students during RD as they take almost all of the incoming class during ED.
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Seems you meant to say âRDâ somewhere in that sentence?
Totally missed that!
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That would be good to know!
That said, the schools we have visited so far all claim we should ignore that sort of thing because ED/EA often includes almost all of their recruited athletes (and although they donât say this, probably other âhookedâ candidates as well), and generally an applicant pool that is stronger on average. But, they claim the evaluation process on the individual level is exactly the same, such that if you were an unhooked applicant with very competitive qualifications, you would have an equal chance either way, even if it ends up fewer people like you are in the RD pool proportionately.
To really test these claims, weâd need a reliable model of how the collegeâs application reviewers âscoredâ their applicants on things like academics, activities, and personal factors, such that we could confirm that applicants with the same modeled reviewer scores got admitted at the same rates whether or not they applied early.
And they are not typically giving us that data.
That saidâHarvard had to give up something close to a dataset like that in their lawsuit. And although this was not the focus of the expert work in that lawsuit, to me that data looks consistent with what Harvard claims. Meaning to me it looked like if you removed hooked applicants and just looked at unhooked applicants, it might well not have mattered if you applied early or not.
So personally, I believed, say, Amherstâs Associate Dean of Admissions when he claimed without qualification at our info session that it made no difference. I do think there was an implied âif you are unhookedâ in that statement, even if it was not expressed. But I otherwise believe it is true that at Amherst, if you are unhooked then your chances of getting the reviewer scores that you need to get admitted are the same either way.
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I think @NiceUnparticularManâs characterization of the ED advantage is the party line and fundamentally accurate. Tufts had once said the same but admitted to some nuance. (You can probably find it in their admissions blog.) Given how schools - particularly smaller, selective ones - craft their classes, I suspect a slight disadvantage in RD. If by the time the RD round rolls around, the ED round has included successful applicants from your state, who have your academic interests, who play your instrument, etc., you just no longer have a profile that meets the schoolâs priorities. So yes, you might have been an admit in ED, but now they need something else. Itâs not something you have any control over, and it may not matter, but it could.
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