That’s certainly the central narrative, but, as we’ve been discussing, it’s also a function of (i) an increase in overall applications driving down the overall admit rate (this year, NU got 37,050 applications, last year - I think your numbers are for a previous year - they got 35,099 and about two-thirds of that increase was RD apps) and (ii) the schools protecting yield and full-pay rates by admitting larger and larger proportions of the class ED.
I calculate that the RD admit rate for NU this year will be about 9% (on reflection, I think that’s what the article meant, rather than overall admit rate, when it said NU would take less than 10% of its applicants). If you’re pretty sure you’d be happy at NU, and can pay for it, it’s the smart play to take 26% odds and apply ED. Your true ED odds could be significantly lower if you’re not a full payer or hooked, but presumably that would also be the case in the RD round.
FWIW, I have experience with athletic applications at a non-Ivy ED school (not Duke) and the coach asked all the recruits to submit ED. In fact, all the application materials had to be in by August before Senior year of HS.
So even a Duke may have almost all of the athletes in the ED numbers. It does seem to be the common practice for everyone to ED if they have a NLI, at least in the sport I am familiar with. It gives the coaches the ability to adjust or revise if necessary and also ensures that their class is indeed their class.
Bobcat – what type of school are you talking about?
The recruited athlete/ED thing is really not that much of a thing at the schools that are full-on D1 with athletic scholarships. It is mostly a thing at Ivy, Patriot and NESCAC type schools.
Williams has 757 athletes and enrollment of 2,019. Bucknell has 775 athletes and enrollment of 3,522. Harvard has 1,097 athletes and enrollment of 6,874.
In contrast, Vandy has 346 athletes and 6,775. NWU 487 and 8,357. Duke 713 and 6,471. Rice 365 and 3843. Mostly much apples and oranges.
@northwesty, you missed my point, which is only that previous assertions that many non-Ivy athletes are in the RD round does not match at all to my experience. I expect there are no or few athletes in the RD round, based on my experience and what I have read. It is in coaches’ interested to have their recruits apply ED and there is no real reason for bona fide recruits not to apply ED.
“The recruited athlete/ED thing is really not that much of a thing at the schools that are full-on D1 with athletic scholarships. It is mostly a thing at Ivy, Patriot and NESCAC type schools.”
Can you back up this assertion at all with facts? I think Nick Saban might be amused to learn that foot ball recruiting at Alabama is not much of a thing compared to Harvard.
The discussion has been about how you can’t take the ED numbers at the big ED selective schools at face value since those ED numbers may also include material amounts of recruited athletes. Just as the ED number may at some schools (Penn for example) will also include material amounts of legacies.
So all of that has nothing to do with Nick Saban and Alabama (which I don’t think has ED and is just 2% athletes). But it does have a significant impact at Williams (37% athletes, 44% of the class filled via ED).
But at Vandy (a selective school that uses ED extensively), not much impact (5% athletes).
@BobcatPhoenix, my experience matches yours. Every full-on D1 school with athletic scholarships in my D’s sport has the recruit apply early and I saw the same in my S’s sport (while he is an Ivy athlete, many of his friends are/were not).
Where are you getting your figures? Vanderbilt’s website lists 3,487 admits and 1,601 enrolled (both undergrad only, as grad school is a different animal). That is 10% of admits and 22% of enrolled, accepting your figure for athletes. Seems pretty material.
It makes the math a little easier if all the schools make all their athletes apply early (which would make sense for the schools, since it locks their recruits in). Assuming this is the case, to correct for the athlete effect in ED and get closer to the real odds for a non-athlete, all you’d do would be to subtract the school’s number of recruited athletes from total ED apps and ED admits and recalculate the odds based on who was left. You’d still have the legacies and some other hooked kids in there, though.
Yes. Every full-on D1 school with athletic scholarships has the recruit apply early. But do they have the recruit apply to an Early Decision program? Most “full-on D1” schools don’t have Early Decision at all. The athletes apply early and get accepted early, but no one is looking at ED numbers.
Apologies if I am wrong, but I was under the impression that recruited athletes at, say, Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, or Vanderbilt were not included in their college’s SCEA or ED numbers. They may have had to apply early, maybe even substantially earlier than the ED deadline, but they would not necessarily be included in those numbers. But at Ivies and D-3 colleges, they have to go through the ED process (if there is one), and they are included in the numbers.
Can someone point me to the source for recruited athletes by school? Going by the top-line NCAA figures for D1, there are about 127 athletes per class per D1 school. 107 for D3.
There are close to 200 per school at most of the Ivies, @BobcatPhoenix. I think, though, that for them at least (and maybe for others) you might have to research it school by school, looking at the websites of the athletic departments or possibly the conferences.
Because my kid got into REA and because we will not be getting financial aid from any other high-ranked schools, my kid is not applying to any other high-ranked schools. He didn’t want to get accepted to any more high-ranked schools and do a calculus analysis of deciding between Stanford, Harvard and Yale (not that he would have gotten in), and he could not get himself UP to apply to other schools when he already got into his hoped-for school.
My attitude regarding acceptances and rejections by colleges is:
If my kid did not get accepted: They did me a favor by telling me they don’t want my kid.
If my kid got accepted: College is lucky to get my kid and our money.
@JHS, I have always assumed all applicants are in the figures. Not doing that seems like an open door to abuse. I will do a little digging on that though. If you are right, it would be significant.
@BobcatPhoenix : Maybe that’s why Northwestern’s ED numbers jumped from 25% to 45%? Who knows?
It’s a bit much to call it “abuse” if athletes aren’t run through the ED system. Here on CC, and maybe in the offices of some high-end private college admissions consultants, we tend to obsess about exact ED vs. RD admission rates. Out in the world, including the vast numbers of kids applying to college, I doubt anyone cares about that degree of exactitude.
If anything, it’s more of an abuse to include the athletes in early admissions numbers. They generally have an admission rate close to 100%, so when they are included in the numbers it distorts the numbers considerably. I thought they had to go through the ED/EA process in the Ivies because Ivy League rules required that athletes be admitted through the same process as everyone else. That’s kind of a silly fiction, and it would surprise me if any college held to it unless they had to.
You can get all the athlete numbers you want from the US Dept of Education website.
But Alabama is 2% athletes and doesn’t have ED. So there’s no reason to mention them here.
Vanderbilt’s enrollment is only 5% athletes. So whether Vandy’s athletes are in their ED numbers or not, it is a pretty small impact. Now at Williams, where 37% of the enrollment are athletes and 44% of the seats are filled via ED, the athlete population has a large influence on the ED numbers. Just like legacies at Penn would impact the ED number significantly.
You’ll find mostly the same story at the other big ED users who also happen to be full on D1 athletic schools (Duke, NWU, Vandy, Rice, Wake).
And there’s no ED at Stanford, ND, USC, BC, UCLA, Cal, Michigan, UVA or UNC. I think that covers the top 30 (with the exception of Gtown hoops and Hopkins lacrosse)!!
I think you need to distinguish between the number of athletes on campus and the number in the ED pool. And, be careful some aggregate number of team members doesn’t include multi-sports kids.
The % of athletes in the ED admits at the school I know best is about 25%.
@JHS, I meant abuse in the sense of getting in non-athlete applicants outside the normal admissions process. Call someone an athlete, give them a scholarship of $1, and admit them off the books? Seems problematic. Even developmental admits show up in the admissions numbers.
Unless someone shows me any hard data otherwise, my personal experience has been that athletes go through whatever early admissions process there is at a school and then duly show up in the figures. It might be distorting to the admissions data, but why does the school care about that?
One problem with quoting the Dept. of Ed data:
Not all Harvard (or any school for that matter) athletes are recruited. 276 people compete in track at Harvard but I would guess (and it is only a guess) that no more than 30 of those athletes were actually recruited. Possibly less. That guess comes from the NCAA equivalency maximums and it could be lower but I doubt higher. So there are (for example) something like 7-10 track recruits per year at Harvard. I believe you will find the same effect at NESCAC schools, maybe even more so.
I would posit that most of the athletes at full-on D1 schools are recruited, which is the basis of your apples and oranges comparison, not Ivy vs. non-Ivy rules.
@lookingforward, just to clarify: By your last sentence, do you mean that 25% of the accepted ED pool are recruited athletes? In which case, something like 12% (for an ED-heavy school) to 7% (for an ED-light school) of all admits are recruits? That is how I read it but just making sure.
@northwesty, are you talking about the EADA website? If so, from what I can tell, it will give you data on total numbers of athletes, but not on numbers of recruits. Harvard, for example, is shown on that website as having 1,097 “unduplicated participants” on varsity teams, but surely there are some walk-ons, and, in any case, the Ivy League caps its members at 230 recruited athletes per year and Harvard recruits 200-205 (as of 2013, according to this article, anyway: http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2013/10/18/future-of-athletic-recruitment-remains-uncertain/). That would be close to what @lookingforward suggests above, which I think is that about a quarter of the students accepted EA (in this case) are recruited athletes, @BobcatPhoenix.