<p>Hello everyone! Thank you for taking the time to read my question!</p>
<p>A boy in my grade has recently "committed" to play a sport at Yale. This is not yet 100% official, because he has to raise his SAT scores a little over 100 points. I also heard from another boy trying to get recruited by the Ivys in that same sport that they recruit a few more athletes than they accept, so even then he might not get in for sure.
Assuming that he does end up getting accepted for his sport, though, would that have any negative effect on my admission chances?
I go to a school with about ~230 students a class and typically 1-3 kids get accepted into Yale each year and about 2 or 3 go to Ivy league schools. Yale is probably the most popular Ivy for my high school. I am just wondering if he is taking one of the limited spots and is decreasing the chances of my acceptance, or if he is considered to be in a completely different pool of applicants and his acceptance would have no impact on mine?
I am also strongly considering applying SCEA (I posted a thread about this a while back). If we both applied SCEA, would that change the answer?</p>
<p>Thank you again!</p>
<p>(Also please note that I know there is no set number of slots they reserve for students at my school, this past year no one got into Yale).</p>
<p>Hmmm interesting question. If athletics were dropped I would like to think that the admission spots would remain constant so there’s some logic to the space taking argument. But consider that being a division 1 athlete is a rather special EC so maybe the athlete can conversely argue that under the light of a holistic Adcom that they are actually the superior candidate?</p>
<p>Yale absolutely will not reject you just because they admitted a number of other people from your school. They will admit 10 people from one school if all 10 are “just the sort of person” Yale wants.</p>
<p>There are definitely soft quotas on geography and school in college admissions, but unless something extreme happens, Yale will always have room to flaunt them. That’s why they’re called “soft” quotas.</p>
<p>I agree that even if Yale only takes so many people from your school (and it’s not at all clear that Yale does this), an athletic recruit would be a different category and unlikely to affect you at all.</p>
<p>“I also heard from another boy trying to get recruited by the Ivys in that same sport that they recruit a few more athletes than they accept, so even then he might not get in for sure.”</p>
<p>"During University President Richard Levin’s tenure, the percentage of athletic recruits at Yale has decreased from 18 percent in the class of 1998 to 13 percent in the class of 2015. Following his direction, the University has recruited fewer athletes in recent years than the maximum number allowed by Ivy League regulations.</p>
<p>While Beckett said Levin reevaluates the recruitment policy each year through discussions with students and coaches, Levin said in March that the number of recruits has remained low because of an increasingly selective applicant pool and a higher “opportunity cost” for each admit. For the class of 2015, Yale recruited only 177 of a total 230 athletes allowed by the Ivy League.</p>
<p>Matthew Thwaites ’13, a member of the varsity track and cross country teams, said the track team has suffered from a shortened roster since its allotted number of recruits is not enough to fill all 17 events in a track meet. The team forfeited points in three events at last year’s Ivy Championships, he said, because it didn’t “have enough bodies to put in uniform.”</p>