understood 
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I appreciate this thread and warning. Fortunately, my D’s
school has college advisors who specialize in recruitment.
3 “Top Recruits” deferrals in one woman’s sport? This is not a light matter. The school and parents take ED1 very, very seriously.
Thank you for sharing. Good luck to your D.
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Not to minimize in any way, shape or form the situation of the parents involved here, but “Top Recruits” is neither an official designation nor a term of art. Maybe it’s because I’m a lawyer, but in my dealings words matter, and when people use the words they use, I assume it’s for a reason. If it had been me on the phone, I’d have insisted the coach tell me if my D were slotted or tipped, and if he responded with, “yes, top recruit,” I’d have said bluntly, “Again, sir, slotted or tipped?” You can have a kid who is tipped and given a lot of support or some support or “we talked to her” support.
Every single year, the disappointments of the type discussed here happen all over. It sucks, but there you have it. The rest of the story is yet to be told and all we really have are accounts of conversations about other conversations. Admissions departments are notoriously “close to the vest,” when talking about admissions; that’s not surprising to me at all. We still don’t know the total number of slotted kids who were deferred to ED2 or RD. Outside of that category, “recruited” has a fuzzy meaning.
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I 100% agree that words matter, but I am not sure Wesleyan coaches use the slot/tip terminology. I don’t think all their coaches do, even if some might. Certainly all NESCAC schools do not use this terminology, nor coaches from schools in other conferences. That is one reason it can be difficult for some to understand what coaches are saying.
It’s much safer to ask a coach ‘are you offering full support’?, followed by ‘what proportion of your athletic recruits with full support have been accepted in the past’?
For some Wesleyan coaches it seems like they are going to be giving a lower % of full support acceptances next year, hopefully they will be honest about that (again assuming the student athletes on this thread were fully support recruits).
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I don’t agree with that at all; it makes no sense to use elastic language when there’s a standardized category readily available that means what you are trying to convey.
There’s no basis in fact for that assertion and the motivation for making it is increasingly suspect (especially, as it concerns inter-collegiate rivalries.)
My whole point is there is NOT a standardized category of terminology. I don’t think slots/tips are used by all of the coaches at Wesleyan, are they? Those terms are NOT used by all coaches in other NESCACs either, let alone other D3 conference peer schools.
I am merely going by the two parents on this thread who said their kids were offered full support in the recruiting process after positive pre-reads. We seem certain about those two. We are not sure the 25 recruits that the coaches told these parents about were fully supported recruits or not. Is that your understanding?
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If that’s your theory, then how the heck do you expect an admissions officer to know who’s “fully supported” and who’s not?
That’s all plausible, and your version of the questions works as well as any. I might say it differently, but that’s of no matter. Of course the coaches make this conversational, but as you say, that’s no unusual.
I’ve not wanted to not take this head on because it was only adding to the anxiety of the two parents; but now that they’ve left the building, I will. I don’t take issue with anyone wondering about the large class and related implications for this admissions cycle. I think I was among the first to express surprise and suggest the coach owed an explanation. That’s all fine.
The contributions that I don’t think have been helpful and with which I do take serious issue are those that amount to jumping to the very worst conclusions based on limited known facts. We know tipped students are frequently not admitted and that even slotted students are sometimes not admitted. I know this happens from two round robin trips through the NESCAC with two “slotted” recruits, one of which profiled on the high end of A Band, and still the coaches said, “She’s fantastic, but you know, I can’t promise.” One poster completely ran with the worst case narrative and comes across like a rival coach badmouthing the competition.
As of right now, not a single poster in this thread knows what “25! 25! 25!” means, or knows whether “3 recruited athletes from one team” is true or represents 3 slotted deferrals, or how the students’ respective profiles compared to the broader pool.
And the proof of the hyperbole has been people offering thanks for the “warning”. Warning? Every single year there are parents who experience this crap. They just don’t all post on CC. There might be a problem here, IDK. None of us do. I mean, admissions? Really? You expected a full vetting of the facts from admissions? Those people are always tight lipped.
The disservice to others, of course, is that the faux outrage based on very little by way of known facts is that you leave others with the impression that there’s a place where this process is always transparent and predictable. There’s not.
I’m a Wesleyan supporter. Obviously. But I would say exactly this if I were visiting the Williams forum and this topic came up.
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I agree we don’t know about the 25, which I have repeatedly said.
IME full support students are always admitted (talking selective D3s now) if they had a positive pre-read and nothing went wrong after the verbal commit, e.g. first semester grade drop off, disciplinary action, arrest, things of that nature. We will just have to agree to disagree on that. I am also a Wesleyan supporter FWIW.
And, here we go again. Upstream, you were extremely quick to define the denominator of “full support students” as 70 - which happens to equal the number of slotted candidates at Wesleyan and at the other NESCACs (give or take a few slots, depending on the number of teams), painting the worst possible scenario that 25 out of 70 slotted candidates were deferred.
You were leading the charge then. Are you prepared to retract that scurrilous implication now?
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I don’t want to argue this anymore, but you gave a “100” to the most hyperbolic poster in the thread when he/she dropped this litany of negative conjecture:
The appearance of agreement or support of that post caused me to assume that’s where your head was too. If you didn’t mean to agree with it, then that’s fine. But that, the 25, is an important point in the thread, and @circuitrider has provided at least some basis to doubt that the 25, if there is in fact a 25, is all or mostly slotted deferrals. Again, very important point.
As to the rest, yes, we’ve all said what we want to say and I’m happy to respect your closing thoughts on the matter.
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I trust that’s the case for everyone, as that was not the intention of this thread.
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Suggesting that posters who arrived at this thread hoping to celebrate and debrief the rest of us on their stats and background visit:
The Wesleyan Early Decision Acceptances Thread - Colleges and Universities A-Z / Wesleyan University - College Confidential Forums
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Hi- I am catching up on this thread and am reading about your D’s situation. I am really sorry she is going through this. My D is a ‘23 and looking to get recruited at a D3 so I understand what a long slog it must have been to figure out which school to apply to - with all the communication, weighing all the choices which I imagine your kid must have had to do. I hope she is able to find a place where she is happy both academically and athletically and that, at least, you get some sort of an explanation from the Coach/school.
Best,
A
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Well this is all very interesting to read. My son had an early pre read for his sport that was “ very positive” , was fully supported by The coach and on a “ list” and got deferred by Admissions to RD . And yes he was competitive with anyone else applying to the school in general. ( great grades, scores etc ). They were shocked too. I guess bottom line is Wes athletic departments just don’t have the pull in admissions that other schools may have. Or at least sport dependent. So when you look at schools, guess you have to take that into account ? We were not aware.
Completely new to this thread, but I do find it to be somewhat ridiculous that say a top soccer player with nearly straight As and great scores, who then gets a pre read as very good and likely to get in, but ultimately doesn’t get in - why? Because there was a cello player who played at Carnegie Hall at 14 and got the spot ? A mathematician junior finalist who might be the next Einstein ? A actor who had a bit part on Broadway ? Come on. This is such nonsense. If you need a soccer player who is academically excellent you should know that right away and keep your word. Same goes if you need musicians, actors, mathematicians. There are enough spots and this competition that lacks transparency and has tinges of mean spiritedness is wrong. And does not set a great example by the school how people should be treated and behave. Not great to know this is how its long been done….
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I had to do a lot of cramming in order to answer some of the questions that came up on this thread and spent time emailing Wesleyan people with far more experience than me. And, they all seem to say the same thing: That this year’s ED process was the equivalent of a 50 year event; that nearly every athlete was highly qualified academically and in many, many instances the coaches had to walk “a very fine line” in managing expectations.
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I’m sorry your son was deferred, but those comparisons of athletes to other talented people is something you are interjecting to the conversation. There is no evidence that either of the students discussed here were bumped in favor of a talented actor or musician … or the like. Of course athletic recruiting and slots and tips is a real thing and so people are rightfully using that avenue and have some basic expectations for what it can do for you as an applicant. But unless you know what the athletic applicant pool looked like, and know everything there is to know about these two applicants, and none of us knows those things, then you have to proceed with a little bit of caution.
I share in your critical view of the process. But then I think about the thousands and thousands of unhooked applicants who have other marvelous talents and qualities and backgrounds and accomplishments who get rejected every day at schools like this. No special explanation or circumstances or CC threads expressing outrage. Just, “no thanks. good luck.” That gives me perspective about the degree to which anybody should really expect anything, and that includes my own.
As to your comments about individual sports and coaches and relative pull with admissions, yes, I agree. We tried to gauge that as best we could. For example, at the school where my soccer player committed, we were told again and again, “Coach _____ always gets her girls through admissions.” At Vassar, we were also made to be aware that coaches have very little pull with admissions, so you didn’t count on anything at Vassar. At Wes, we were never under the impression that either of those two extremes was the case, but then again, we only dealt with two sports.
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Hello everyone! I was deferred from ED1 to ED2. Has anyone gotten deferred to Regular Decision instead? Thanks.