<p>On Duke's website, they say they have about a 11% acceptance rate. That seems normal for a high quality, selective school.</p>
<p>However, a friend told me her incredibly qualified son applied, and his year's acceptance was 5% discounting alumni family, athletes, minorities, and donors.</p>
<p>Does this mean I shouldn't ED there because I'd have an infinitesimal chance?</p>
<p>If you want to go to Duke, just ED there and see what happens. Duke likely isn’t “lying” to you.</p>
<p>Overall acceptance rate of 13%. Acceptance rate of 5% discounting all of those groups. Doesn’t seem contradictory to me. But you’ll get a lot of people clicking on your thread, I guess.</p>
<p>Colleges and/or admission officers lie in order to increase rankings? How surprising ( sarcasm). Most colleges don’t lie per se. However, they will do almost anything to “elaborate” or out right cover up the truth. Yes, if everyone knew that the real admit percentages were below 10% when you subtract athletes, children of donors etc., fewer people would apply This would negatively affect rankings, and NO school wants to negatively affect rankings.Here is an example; my son attended a law fair. He had a decent GPA but bombed the LSAT. We had at least 15 admission officers tell him to his face that he has a very realistic chance at their school because of his CPA background and GPA, yet NOT ONE school that was at the fair admitted him despite his having a sterling essay and great recommendations. Of course , they could reply that there was more to it then just the GPA and LSAT. However, there is no doubt in my mind that these admission officers would do anything to get more applicants and beef up other factors that raise rankings. They may not all lie,but they would certainly resort to" stretching" the truth as long as they have an 'out" in case they are caught.</p>
<p>I was suckered into clicking this thread.</p>
<p>Lots of incredibly qualified kids get rejected from Duke and other top schools. That doesn’t mean they’re lying - but there are lots of factors at play in who makes the cut when you have a huge pool of super-talented kids.</p>
<p>If you are serious about Duke and feel comfortable doing ED, realize that every year Duke accepts a higher percentage of students ED. Leaving fewer and fewer RD slots. Applying ED gives you a much better chance than applying RD.</p>
<p>Yeah sorry y’all I kinda hooked you into clicking on this hahah but it’s a legitimate problem. Thanks for all the input</p>
<p>I don’t know that I’d trust the 5% number, but it’s a fact that all the selective schools’ admissions rates for non-hooked, non-legacy applicants are quite a bit lower than their stated admission rates. Duke is not an exception in this regard.</p>
<p>If Duke is your first choice and you seem reasonably in the profile then give it a shot. Every school, not just Duke, takes in athletes, most of the legacy kids early so it will be the basically the same story anywhere you apply ED.</p>
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<p>Moderator’s note: If OP starts any additional threads with controversial headlines, she will no longer be posting here.</p>
<p>I think you need to approach this with the standard ED caveats and not obsess on the acceptance rate. You should apply ED if it really is your first choice and if you’ve run the NPC and it’s affordable. Ideally your statistics should be in the top 25%. ED is not for people who need to use senior year to pull up their GPA, re-take tests or pad their resume with last minute EC’s. Or for people who would be better off comparing financial aid offers from multiple schools. It seems to me that lots of people try to use ED in the hope of compensating for below average stats for their target school. If that’s not you, and Duke is clearly your first choice, then why not go for it.</p>