NESCAC schools are D3, which means there are no scholarships for athletes. Need based aid only.
Although NESCAC schools, like all d3s, don’t give athletic scholarships, Trinity College, Conn College and Wesleyan all offer merit aid in addition to need based aid.
No athletic scholarships in D3. Like I said above, baseline is two fully supported slots for sports other than football. There can be exceptions and there are also additional athletes who receive soft support. You will find the info at the links I posted above educational.
As fascinating as this sidebar is, please move on from athletic recruiting and the size of recruiting classes and the difference between ED acceptance rates with/without hooks.
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Just saw this posted on the Rice website…463 of 478 Class of 2025 ED admits enrolled, so a loss of 15.
Some portion of those 15 may have taken a gap year, but it’s good to have an example of the ED fallout from a highly selective school…not many schools share this data.
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Can’t speak for Trin, but Wesleyan offers very little in the way of merit aid: a dozen full-tuition scholarships for Asian/Pacific Islander internationals and IIRC two or three scholarships sponsored by alum, Lin-Manuel Miranda to incoming frosh who submit the best examples of narrative writing.
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I think Rice is high enough rated and gives great FA so people don’t ED there and somewhere “better”.
I failed to recall it was regular EA instead of REA. That helps to explain the essentially nonexistent bump in admit stats a few years back.
Cornell offers that level of detail and also has info archived going back to the 2010 admissions cycle.
• for the class of 2014, there were 1,175 ED admits and 1,147 enrollees for an attrition rate of 2.4%
• for the class of 2025, there were 1,930 ED admits and 1,868 enrollees for an attrition rate of 3.2%
So there’s some evidence of a trend, along with an enormous jump in the number of ED admits and applicants (from 3,594 to 9,017). However, it should be noted that tuition also increased substantially during the same period (+50%, give or take), so it can’t be ruled out that some of the added attrition is truly due to financial issues rather than something else.
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Good find. We don’t really know though if those numbers reflect attrition/financial reasons or not, because it includes those who take GAP years which have also increased the past two years (likely due to Covid).
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ED attrition for the class of 2023 was only 2.0%, so yes, Covid definitely complicates the numbers (and 2025 has the test-optional application boom as well).
Absolutely yes re punishing the high school. Our private school is a big feeder to a particular Ivy (a dozen or more kids admitted every year). One year a recruited athlete backed out of their ED acceptance (no idea on details why and whether there was any justification or just an opportunity to be recruited at a school they liked better) and that year the college accepted zero kids regular admission from our school.
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In other words, backing out of ED causes the penalty to accrue to other people rather than oneself. This is not a deterrent against unethical behavior by someone prone to doing such unethical behavior in the first place.
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But you don’t know those things are related, at all. It’s natural to speculate, but if the college admissions people denied applicants simply because of some other student’s behavior in the previous year(s), that would be unethical on their part. College admissions officers also must follow NACAC’s best practices, the same as college counselors.
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Let’s just say it was incredibly unusual. Certainly no one can prove cause and effect.
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Exactly.
I’ve said this before, but I have never heard an admissions staffer say that they would administer consequences to a high school where a student or students back out of an ED acceptance. We saw in earlier posts above that Rice and Cornell recently had 3%-4% of ED applicants not matriculate. There are reasons where it’s ok to do so, maybe that athlete’s family couldn’t afford the ED school?
What’s the incentive for high school GCs to enforce ED (and similar) agreements if there’s no consequence to the high schools?
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IMO it’s the honor system…the GC signed an agreement as did the student and parents, and most people take that seriously.
But it’s not a legally binding agreement and there are valid reasons for students to back out. There are no ED police. Schools don’t want a student who doesn’t want to attend, especially when they would be free to transfer after a semester, what would be the point of anyone ‘making’ them attend for a short time?
I haven’t seen any data that the ED attrition rate is on the rise…not sure if any organization tracks that, and for the last two years this attrition rate would be confounded by covid (unless gap years are tracked separately and pulled out).
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They don’t say it out loud, it happens. Relationships between admissions departments are a large part, though not everything, with independent high schools and colleges.
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