Re: 20/25% of students are D1 athletes, this does not mean all of these athletes. The article below mentions a figure of “about 200” recruited athletes per year at Ivy League schools. At Princeton, that would be about 15% of enrollees, and 10.4% of admittees.
One thing I wonder about is the percentage that are taken SCEA.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/sports/before-athletic-recruiting-in-the-ivy-league-some-math.html
^ *does not mean all of these athletes are recruited.
20% of the undergrad student body is athletes, and another 12ish percent is legacy, and another 11-12 percent is internationals so after you admit those groups (yes, I know there is overlap), a good portion of the seats are already gone. That is why Princeton is hard to get into.
You’re getting warmer. It’s why these sanctimonious posts about 1. GPA 2. Test Scores 8. Cured Cancer are so hilarious.
By rule, Princeton and the other Ivys are restricted to approximately 215 recruited athlete admits in a particular class. No idea if Princeton admits that many. The number of admits per school and class is not publicly available, although there are published reports that no Ivy admits the max number of athletes year over year. Anecdotally, it seems that the league average is somewhere around 200 athletic admits per class. 200 recruited athletes out of a class of 1328 means 15% of an entering class are likely letter recipents/eligible, and admitted under somewhat different rules as spelled out in the Ivy Common Agreement.
In general, about half of the recruited athletes will have scores below the middle range of objective stats (standardized tests and GPA) for the class as a whole. So roughly 7.5% or 100 kids. For this reason, I believe it is incorrect to state that a large portion of the kids admitted with stats below the median are athletes or legacies. Kids with stats below the median can and do get admitted every year. But like the athletes, they have something on there application that makes them stand out from the remainder of the applicant pool. The problem is, unless you are recruited there is no way of knowing that your particular unique talent/experience is: (a)really unique and (b)will be valued by Princeton in a particular application cycle.
I also am not sure there is much objective difference between a kid with a 33 ACT (Princeton’s average score) and a 32 ACT (Princeton’s 25% ACT score). I think there is a reason objective stats are provided in 25%/75% fashion, namely that a point or maybe even two on the ACT means less than the rest of the application. Yes, there is a threshold. I just think the threshold is the 25% number rather than the median. I think that gets you in the door so to speak and then, as @planner03 says, they will really start looking at the rest of the app.
I think that @psywar is absolutely correct. At schools like Princeton, an applicant needs to ring all the bells.
@keikei, based on what is posted on the athletic recruit board, the majority of athletic admits are admitted SCEA. This is not true for the sport with which I am most personally familiar (football). In my son’s class, all 31 football recruits came in through regular decision. I think this is because most sports sign letters of intent in November, while football does not sign until February. Since the intitial purpose of the likely letter was to provide recruits with some comfort about their admission before foregoing other scholarship offers, I assume most Ivys will try and get likely letter reviews done prior to November for the early signing sports.