I think they OP meant acceptance is easier to achieve via ED.
Thatâs how I took it as well, but that is not always the case either (or itâs much less of a bump than on first blush), after adjusting for hooked applicants and those from organizations such as Questbridge and Posse.
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Yes. I think there is a hooked bump buried in all ED decisions. The trick is account for pref differences at schools.
-% of undergrads who are legacy with a guesstimate on their acceptance rates
-annual QB admits by school
-athletic pref (yes/no) and total athletes at the school
-is this a school faculty would want their kid to attend? Do they give a tuition discount?
You can take the ED acceptances and total apps and at least carve a few groups out to get a lower ED acc rate ceiling. The magnitude of the adjustment will vary across schools.
I think WashU still offers a very strong ED acceptance bump because there are few legacies, no athletic pref and relatively few QB slots as a percentage of entering class size. The school would fall on the low end of the ED adjustment scale. At some NESCAC schools, the adjusted ED rates may be no different than RD. The Northwesterns, Vandys and Dukes of the world are somewhere between.
I agree there is still a WashU ED bump after accounting for hooked applicants. WashU coaches can and do offer fully supported athletic slots, I would guess around 75-100 recruited athletes/year many of whom apply in the ED rounds.
ETA: WashU took 60 QB students this cycle (not necessarily all in EDI): WU receives record number of applications, admits 4,374 students in a tumultuous college admissions cycle - Student Life
How about that the debt the student is about to amass isnât worth the degree they will eventually earnâŠ?
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Add in âYour mileage may differâ, the disclaimer that should be applied when interpreting accepted student stats for GPA and standardized test scores listed by the college.
If the student is an applicant with a âhookâ, such as URM (and URMs are not all created equal - different criteria are applied for different races and sexes at varying institutions), recruited athlete, big donor child, and possibly legacy child, they are accepted with lower stats than required for unhooked applicants. Also, some accepted students had significant âspikesâ (extraordinary achievement in specific areas), and also might have been accepted with lower stats. These stats are averaged into the overall acceptance stats, thus skewing the âaverageâ downwards. So, the unhooked, unspiked applicant with stats that are within the 25-75% range might naively think that they have a chance of admission - they donât. Even with perfect stats, without a hook or a spike, they donât have even a 50% chance of admission to any of the tippy-top schools, and maybe not even to most of the T20 schools.
Different schools love different things. We found, to my childâs great joy, that Harvard loves its musicians. God only knows why itâs important to Harvard that they should have great musical ensembles - isnât that what people go to Conservatory for? But they do. Tufts wants âdemonstrated interestâ or theyâll reject you, even if youâre God. Point is, do your research, find out what the school wants to hear, and tell it to them, assuming youâve got the criteria to support it.
Consider the sex ratio and the popularity of majors, when applying. For example, some engineering schools with largely male student bodies will favor female applicants. Some engineering schools are trying to expand into full-fledged universities with non-engineering majors, and so would favor applicants with the expressed intention of majoring in a non-engineering field. Some schools have highly ranked boutique departments of which they are proud (such as Linguistics at UMass Amherst), and hence will offer merit money and honors college to students with otherwise lesser stats. On the other hand, former womenâs colleges which have gone co-ed will admit men with lesser stats, in an attempt to even the sex ratio at the school.
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A really excellent reply - it is just very difficult often to suss out this kind of info.
Itâs not that hard to gather this info, but it can be time consuming. Common data sets have much of this info, including acceptance rate by gender.
Questbridge and Posse numbers are typically made public in press releases, social media, and/or student newspaper articles.
Itâs fairly straightforward to estimate number of recruited athletes (and they really only make a difference at small to medium schools).
Often proportion legacy is also on websites, or in the student newspaper. Penn usually publishes theirs and itâs not crazy to apply that same percentage as an estimate for peer schools.
As for what a school values, read their mission statements, annual reports, and websites. Do their admissions sessions and ask questions.
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With the caveat that an accepted applicant may be a part of several pools, e.g both legacy and recruited athlete, so any analysis will be estimates. Additionally, with some exceptions, like QB and athletic recruits, it may be hard to break out the pools ED vs RD.
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WashU doesnât have slots for athletes. They donât even do likely letters. Athletes find out ED. Coaches will offer their âfull supportâ and theyâll go to bat for their recruits w/ admissions, but they explicitly tell athletes they canât guarantee admission. There are athletes sitting between the 25th and 50th percentiles on both GPA and test scores who could be viewed as strong athletic targets (1st year contributors) who get denied admissions. Could there be some âunofficial slotsâ? Possibly for a highly prized basketball/football recruit already sitting at the 25th or higher. Maybe thereâs 10 kids in a class or something. But there is a very limited amount of leverage coaches/the AD can bring to the table. This was true with the last AD at least, from when I was there and in asking a couple of current athletes their experiences.
I think if you come in with a 1500+, 3.9+ type GPA and solid course selection, itâs probably a done deal. But 20% of those kids are getting into WashU completely unhooked.
There are absolutely athletic slots at WashU where coaches offer their full support thru the admissions process. Admissions does pre-reads as well. Recruits with positive pre-reads and full coach support typically apply ED and have very high assurance of admission. Many students who verbally commit make that information public. There are no likely lettersâŠlikely letters are uncommon in D3 schools.
Thatâs not a slot however. A slot is a guarantee barring something else doesnât come up (such as a criminal/character issue). Pass the pre-read, coach wants you enough, done. I went there. I live here now. I know some of the coaches. Iâve met the former AD. They will all tell you they do not have slots. I know former D3 All Americans. None of them were given slots.
A coachâs âfull supportâ falls well short of a guarantee there. Is it true that recruits get an admissions rate odds boost? Of course.
A kid who can start as a freshman as Harvardâs holding midfielder goes into Harvard the admissions office with a 3.8 and 1390 and the coach wants him? Done. Same kid at Williams? Done. WashU? Good luck with that one.
The only reason they lose as few kids as they do to the AO (and as a percentage, they likely lose more in the process than the Ivy and NESCAC counterparts) is because they donât have the same degree of clarity/guarantee as coaches who can offer slots. Therefore, they donât bother with more marginal candidates. This is why the athlete GPA/test scores are the same as the non-athletes there and not at the at the other two conferences. The coaches realize they have less leverage and adjust accordingly. Not that this is better or worse. Itâs just different.
This is not my recent and current experience with WashU athletic recruiting, at all. We will just have to agree to disagree.
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Itâs possible. If things have changed, it has been quite recently.