“… Take Vanderbilt University as an example. It fills 54 percent of its incoming class through two rounds of early decision. To most students and parents that might sound like they still have plenty of spots to parcel out in the regular round. But remember, the vast majority of applications that colleges receive — and then later boast about –come through regular decision. In Vanderbilt’s case, the regular round yields only around 500 students from more than 25,000 applications.” …
Very enlightening. Thank you for posting the article.
Is the detailed data on number of application vs. accepted by ED and RD available online like on the school’s website or their CDS? I remember seeing some school show these numbers in a brochure but for many of them I can’t seem to dig it out. My daughter plans to RD a few elite schools that offer ED (including Vanderbilt), so I’m interested to see what real chance RD applicants have. I won’t be surprised if RD rate is less than half of the overall rate.
It is only rarely that colleges offer admission stats for different sub-buckets. Early versus regular admission is one example of admission sub-buckets. Admission by division or major within the school is another example (e.g. popular majors like CS, engineering majors, or nursing may be much more competitive than the school’s overall admission stats may imply).
For early versus regular admission, the schools often have an incentive to keep the information secret, since increasing applicants’ uncertainty about early versus regular admission chances can be to the school’s advantage in inducing more ED applicants.
@carbmom You can get a pretty good estimate of ED and RD acceptance rates by using their yield rate. Schools like Northwestern and Vanderbilt have yield rate of around 35-40%, and accept around 50% of their class in the ED cycle. About 98-99% of the ED acceptees enroll. While the number of applications go up significantly in the RD cycle, it is also true that the yield rate goes down significantly in the RD cycle. For example, at Northwestern, only 1 in 5 RD acceptees enroll (20% yield rate). For the class of 2020, Northwestern, based on a rough estimate, had 35% ED acceptance rate and ~14% RD acceptance rate. The 30,000-Foot View…RD acceptance rate is half of ED acceptance rate at the top schools.
This is the same article rehashed every year since Penn started ED over a decade ago.
ED was not invented by Penn.
It was started by the Pentagonals in the 1950’s. The Pentagonals were Amherst, Bowdoin, Dartmouth, Wesleyan and Williams.
Source: collegiategateway.com, January 2017
Exactly, nothing new for people on cc but for the general public looking at colleges could make them pay more attention to applying ED for admission advantage if you will, at the risk of being locked in. Not sure Penn invented ED, but they did exploit it to move up in the rankings.
You can usually (but not always) estimate it based on the CDS. The number of ED applicants and acceptances is (usually) in Section C21. The number of total applicants and acceptances is in Section C1. If you subtract the C21 numbers from the C1 numbers, the remainders should represent the RD numbers.
Example: For Fall 2016, Section C1 of the the Vanderbilt CDS reports 32,442 total applicants and 3,487 total acceptances, for a total acceptance rate of 10.7%.
Section C21 reports 3,702 ED applicants and 885 ED acceptances, for an ED acceptance rate of 23.9%.
If we subtract the ED numbers from the total numbers, we get an estimated 28,740 RD applicants and 2,602 RD acceptances, for an RD acceptance rate of 9.1%. So less than half the ED rate.
https://virg.vanderbilt.edu/virgweb/CDSC.aspx?year=2016
Sometimes schools don’t put the ED numbers in Section C21, which makes it harder.
This seems a bit misleading.
First, Vanderbilt enrolls more than 500 students via RD. The 2016 CDS shows a total of 1,601 new frosh in Fall 2016. It also shows 885 ED acceptances (as per the previous post); assuming a 99% ED yield, that means 876 frosh from ED. By subtraction, this implies 725 frosh (not 500) from RD.
Second, Vanderbilt’s RD yield is much lower than the ED yield, so they have to accept a lot more than 725 applicants to fill those RD slots. As noted in the previous post, they apparently accepted 2,602 RD applicants to enroll those 725 RD students, for an RD yield of 27.9%.
So a better sentence would read:
Granted, an acceptance rate of around 10% is still low. But it doesn’t sound quite as scary as “the regular round yields only around 500 students from more than 25,000 applicants”