I am a rising junior that is very interested in applying to Duke and I am reviewing its admission stats right now. I know that often recruited athletes will apply ED, and since Duke has a strong athletic program, I was wondering if anyone knew how many recruited athletes they have (frosh). More specifically, I was wondering how many recruited athletes apply ED. I looked everywhere online but couldn’t find any sort of statistic. The reason I want it is to see the uninflated ED acceptance rate to decide if I want to apply ED there. Thanks!
So student athletes make up about 10% of the student body at Duke (https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2019/04/duke-athletics-annual-equity-report-shows-differences-between-mens-and-womens-teams). Roughly speaking that would mean 165 student athletes per class of around 1700. The vast majority of them will be recruited, minus the occasional walk-on and students who decide to join an athletic team after getting into Duke without being recruited (kudos to them). You can maybe estimate that around 80 percent (132) will be recruited, and almost all of them through the early decision round. It isn’t perfect, but you can estimate that around 15-20% of the around 850 spots offered in the early decision round at Duke go to recruited athletes.
Hope this helps.
No need to worry too much on the # of recruited athletes if you’re considering to apply via ED. It really varies from year to year, but the general estimate is anywhere from 10% to 20%. The ED acceptance rate takes into account of recruited athletes, legacy applicants, special donor lists, etc. You would have to account for all of those to find the “true” acceptance rate for people without those hooks.
The schools do not give that information. It is not even a fact that most recruited athletes apply ED. I know many many recruited athlete and hardly any who were accepted ED. Many go through a special process and are not really ED or RD even.
In many sports, it is not necessary to apply ED at Duke like it might be at a D3. Coach K is getting the 5+ players he wants for the basketball team whether they apply ED or not. They’ll have his support and I doubt many of them apply ED. Those really top athletes are often still doing visits and talking to coaches and aren’t ready to pick a school by the ED deadline. Same is likely true for the lacrosse teams, the football team, the baseball team. The athletes might want to apply ED just to get it over with, but don’t have to and will still sign their NLI in November even if they haven’t been officially admitted.
At some D3 schools, the coaches will only give support if the athlete applies ED, and even then admissions is not a sure thing (hello Haverford, I’m looking at you). Duke (and Stanford and ND and Vandy) recruits aren’t under the same admissions pressure as the D3 schools. The coaches can get a 23 ACT/ 3.0 athlete in if necessary where that just isn’t happening at many D3 schools.
On average, there are 660 varsity athletes at any given time, but the number of recruits would likely be higher than 165, since you have one-and-dones like Zion, or just normal attrition/athletic burnout. Regardless, AFAIK, Duke does not publish the number of recruits per year. But as noted above, there are other hooks in the ED applicant pool (also unquantifiable) that drive the ED acceptance rate.
Well, for highly selective colleges, they all go through the special process of a pre-read, but from a data reporting perspective, their applications are still part of either the ED/EA pool or the RD pool.