NESCAC Spoken Here: 2023 version

College Search & Selection
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142

I agree this is possible in some cases, and I think it gets into the very loose definition of what can count as a “hook”. There are obvious ones, like recruited athletes. But also less obvious ones, like the people who can allow even a smaller college to brag it has students from 49 states (whenever it is not 50, I always think they should be required to disclose the missing states . . . ). I know nothing about music admissions, but it makes sense that could work in a way vaguely similar to athletics. I have heard, with zero objective confirmation, that some smaller humanities departments these days are lobbying to get at least a few possible majors (or at least dual majors, or minors) in every admit pool. And so on.

So, yeah, if you had one or more of these sorts of things going for you, could it help in a marginal case in ED/REA? I can definitely imagine that being possible. But I also think you would have to be very close anyway. I mean, presumably it is often only 49 or 48 or whatever because they just weren’t willing to admit enough people from the missing state(s) to guarantee a yield . . . .

And of course most of their admits are not really like that–they are from states with lots of admits, have relatively common talents, have relatively popular intended majors (or are undeclared), and so on. And all that is fine because in fact many people do get admitted with that sort of profile.

So I do believe what they are saying is mostly true, and true for most applicants. It is just possible in some cases, it is a little less true.

All this is why I personally think rather than strategizing your ED/REA decisions around observed generic admit rates, it makes more sense to do it around perceived fit.

I again know nothing directly about Dance admissions, but given the discussion above if you would love to go to Smith in part because it is a great LAC but also because it seemed like a great school for Dance, then maybe you ED Smith–assuming you do not like another school even better. If Smith is at least a realistic “reach” to begin with, this seems to me like as good a bet as any for “using” whatever ED benefit might even conceivably be available to you (understanding it might not exist anywhere). And then there is no painful downside of wondering if you misused it, since if it works by assumption you will be thrilled.

Or if you are from a state which is in perennial danger of being that 50th state they can’t quite get, why not just ED/REA your favorite realistic reach? It will probably have just as good a chance working there as anywhere.

And so on.

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143

This. 100%. And frankly, it’s also quite possible that even in the ED round, if you look like a lot of the hooked students who are athletes or legacies, you’d be at the same disadvantage. ED works best when it’s genuinely your first choicr and a great fit.

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144

This aligns with my sense that the primary advantages to being in the ED round are that you are among the first applicants considered and that you are part of a smaller pool.

My kid’s HS has 20-30 applicants to my kid’s first choice each year; however, very few of them apply ED. Assuming my kid has a competitive application, it should help to be among the first from their school considered by the admissions committee and not to be in direct competition/comparison with the 20+ other strong candidates.

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145

That part of your post makes me think that you don’t think admissions is as holistic at these schools at it actually is. My recruited student who, of course, applied ED wrote a personal statement that her physics advisor recalled to her in a meeting during her sophomore year. So that is a faculty member who reads personal statements remembering one from one of the kids who take up that % of kids admitted ED. There’s nothing automatic about it for anyone, especially for the unhooked cohort.

As to avoidable anxiety, I would posit that you are entirely in control of that variable. Your kid should not have that much riding on attending Amherst. It is a fine, fine, school, but: (1) it’s not for everybody; (2) there are plenty of other schools which are just as good and, perhaps, better for your kid; and (3) unless I’ve missed something in the thread about your D that makes her quite unique on a national level, the cold, hard truth of the matter is that she probably won’t get in no matter what she does. The cake is mostly baked, and she faces unrelentingly stiff competition for a spot in a very small class. As an unhooked applicant, the ED approach will of course increase her odds, but it’s still going to be a steep climb.

If you’re really looking for a strategy that will work, start by not hyper-focusing on one of the toughest admits in the country that also happens to care a great deal about a particular hook (athletics) that your kid apparently doesn’t have. Try Grinnell, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Whitman, Reed or one of the many other fine LACs that aren’t as serious about sports as is the NESCAC member schools. I can’t imagine trying to craft a strategy around trying to guess about the non-athlete % of the ED cohort in a particular year.

Just to be clear, if your D does end up applying to Amherst ED and gets in, it likely won’t be because of anything you’ve managed to figure out in this thread. I’ve just seen too many pissed-off people who thought their kid was going to make it into this or that school, and of that group many were parents of recruited athletes who thought it was “in the bag.”

I wish you all the best of luck.

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146

Agree with all of this, and the rest of your post.

We can make a decent guesstimate/range of the non-athlete % of the ED cohort at Amherst…but big picture I agree there can be fluctuations from year to year. And NESCACs could still change their athletic recruiting for THIS cycle, because they purposely delayed pre-reads to wait for SCOTUS’ affirmative action ruling.

From the 2016 study on athletics at Amherst that Pres Martin commissioned (numbers still accurate AFAIK), there are 67 ‘athletic factors’ each year (athletes with full coach support thru the admission process)…the vast majority of these will apply ED. There are another 60-90 ‘coded athletes’ each year, we don’t have visibility to the ED/RD split of these.

For Class of 2027, there were 191 ED acceptances. Let’s say 50 of those were athletic factors and 30-45 were coded athletes. Another 20 for Questbridge matches in ED.

So, that leaves us 191 minus 50 AF minus 37 (coded athletes, avg of 30 and 45, of course someone might want to play around with scenarios) minus 20 QB = 84.

Other hooks that we know Amherst values: (from Class of 2027 data): First gen (21%) and POC (60%, includes Asian). We have no idea how many more of the 84 slots would be taken up by these applicants (there is also some overlap between the various hooks).

Conservatively say another 20% of the ED spots go to non-athlete hooked applicants, so 84 minus 17 = 67. I’m ignoring legacy, because even though 4% of Class of 2027 is legacy, Amherst gives no pref to legacy anymore. I’m also ignoring state distribution.

We still have to haircut the pool for international students, which was 12% of the 191 in Class of 2027. So, 67 ED slots less another 23 for international students (191 ED acceptances x .12)…but there could be overlap here also with some hooked applicants, so reduce this impact by 50% to be conservative, so 67 minus 12 = 55.

So, roughly 55 unhooked slots in ED, divided by 2 = about 27 spots per gender in ED round for unhooked US candidates. Regardless the estimates one might replace my guesstimates with, clearly a reach for all unhooked applicants necessitating a reasonable, balanced college list and a firm awareness of the miniscule numbers we are talking about.

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147

I honestly don’t think anyone can really count on ED helping an unhooked candidate. My DS applied to Williams ED because at the time, it was his clear first choice -hands down. He was deferred ED. Then deferred again in RD. In the meantime, he applied to Amherst, Bowdoin, Middlebury, Georgetown, and Harvard all RD. He was WL at Harvard and admitted to the others. So - there is really not a discernable pattern to this. It was based on holistic factors that were not obvious to our applicant. As an unhooked applicant in ED, Williams was not willing to use one of their relatively few unhooked slots for him until they had a better sense of their overall applicant pool and how the rest of the class would fill out. It wasn’t that he wasn’t highly qualified - he exceeded all of their published admissions criteria. They simply didn’t need a highly qualified kid with his specific characteristics in their class that year. Perhaps if he played a different instrument; or a different sport; or came from a different state, etc. We will never know and it doesn’t matter. Between ED and RD, he fell in love with his then second choice, Bowdoin, and went on to be as happy as can be there last year. So - yes apply ED to Amherst but be prepared that your students won’t get in - despite the fact that they are as qualified as others who will be admitted. It is simply how this process works.

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148

That’s the knock-out punch right there.

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This entire thread could be boiled down to this one example and explanation.

The other one that I tend to remember is from @gotham_mom , whose D and D’s friend applied to Wes and Williams. As I recall, at least one of them was waitlisted or rejected at Wes and admitted to Williams, and the other had it the other way around. Or something like that. Maybe she can remind us. It’s not that it’s random as much as the annual admissions cycle is fluid for what the institution wants and needs. You can’t be all things to all people all the time. Somewhere along the line, you are not going to be what a school is looking for at the particular time they are reading your application. That’s how it goes.

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150

What happened is even less predictable IMHO. My D and her friend were both admitted RD to Williams, but my D was accepted to Vassar, denied by Wesleyan. Her friend was accepted to Wesleyan and denied by Vassar. They attended the same high school and were both unhooked with similar academic records and arts ECs. :woman_shrugging:

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151

That’s right. Now I remember. Unpredictable indeed.

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152

Just briefly, my S24 in particular is actually quite chill about the process and is not necessarily applying to Amherst at all (but might be). He will probably do an REA school as his first choice, so won’t ED anywhere, although nothing is actually decided yet.

The line you quoted was based more on my conversations with other kids and parents online and in real life, who think of ED decisions as very high stakes and are working off a lot of very incomplete information.

153

ED is a great option if the school is your first choice and is affordable. Attention also needs to be paid to the percentage of the class that historically is filled ED, accounting for some guestimate of athletic and donor hooks. I don’t think URM and legacy hooks are strong enough or that much more prevalent in the ED than RD rounds. This gives you an idea of the total spots available for RD. If my kid were “pointy” in something limited (the proverbial tuba player) RD may be disadvantageous in the sense that that profile was filled in ED.

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154

Exactly, and as opposed to athletic recruiting, which gets you many, many more tuba player slots.

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155

I didn’t read all 153 posts in this thread, but FWIW, Tufts is a NESCAC school. Forgotten in the subheading.

156

Not forgotten, just not enough room for more than 10 tags! FWIW, Tufts was mentioned upstream as a possible alternative to both Brown and to Amherst in @NiceUnparticularMan 's quest for a “medium-sized university” for DS.

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157

I mean… let’s work a hypothetical.

Let’s use, oh, Bowdoin as an example.

According to the 2022-23 CDS:

  • Overall admit rate was 9.2% (862/9376)
  • ED admit rate was 26.5% (267/1009)
  • RD admit rate was 7.1% (595/8367)

The part we don’t know is, how many applicants were supremely hooked (athletes, children of major donors, kids with multiple hooks, etc.) in the ED and RD rounds. But let’s assume at least that most of them applied ED. I’ll concentrate mainly on ED – but keep in mind, an unhooked applicant’s chances might be lower than the RD admit rate because… some will be hooked in that round too.

But let’s hold the RD rate constant at 7.1% for the purpose of this comparison, anyway. Even though it might drop to 5-6% for unhooked…

Back in 2013 there was an article written in a Bowdoin publication (which I cannot find the link to anymore…) mentioning that NESCAC schools were limited to admitting 77 students annually as athletic recruits. Let’s say by now, they can have 100. I would rather overstate that than understate it. So 100 athletic recruits per year at a NESCAC school. I hope this is still in the ball park. Let’s say there are another 25 development cases, and another 25 multi-hooked applicants. So 150 very, very strongly hooked applicants. Let’s say they are all admitted ED.

So they go 150/150 in the ED round.

That means those unhooked, or with lesser hooks, went (about) 117/859 in the ED round. That comes to 13.6%.

So even after taking out the supremely hooked applicants in the ED round (and none from the RD round…), the ED admit rate for unhooked or lowly hooked applicants is still nearly twice as high as the RD admit rate – 13.6% for ED, 7.1% for RD.

So while it is true that the ED:RD discrepancy in admit % is not as extreme as it seems for unhooked applicants, I think that, statistically at least, there is still some advantage in ED vs. RD.

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158

Even if those estimated percentages are correct, statistically speaking they are from applicant pools that vary substantially in composition. It is very likely that the unhooked self-selected ED applicant pool is substantially stronger overall than the unhooked RD applicant pool. This is why many schools state that there isn’t an advantage in applying ED, despite what the numbers seem to say.

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159

Bowdoin, in particular, has been TO longer than any other NESCAC. Is it so farfetched that ED is where they load up on high-scoring applicants?

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There just isn’t any way to know, without a breakdown of mean and median stats broken down by RD and ED – applicants and admits. Chancing by admission round will probably always be, at best, a semi-educated guess.

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RD vs ED admissions rates is not NESCAC specific, and is best covered elsewhere (in case the thousand earlier threads on that topic were insufficient). Let’s move the conversation along, please.