<p>Props to Duke for that one.</p>
<p>I'm just curious if Duke has done anything in particular to achieve this or if it was just out of the blue (no pun intended)</p>
<p>Best year in football in the last decade. Southerners wanting the big athletic experience and Big academics flock to become a part of the crowd at Wade Stadium.</p>
<p>I would imagine some of it is due to a reaction from the intensity of last year’s admissions cycle. I know that some top-notch schools (Yale, Dartmouth, maybe others) had their application numbers go down a little bit, so I suspect that some people who normally would have applied early to schools like Dartmouth or Yale saw how incredibly selective it was last year and instead opted for a slightly easier target: Duke. Of course this could never account for the whole 33%, though.</p>
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<p>I wouldn’t call Duke football a “big athletic experience” just yet, particularly compared with other schools in the south. There is still a LOT of work to be done there.</p>
<p>Also, the majority of Duke’s students come from regions other than the Southeast. It is very much a Yankee school.</p>
<p>one thing to keep in mind is that Duke, like JHU, has historically not gotten very many ED apps. it’s not a Penn or Cornell that gets thousands of applications. so a 32% increase only represents a few hundred extra apps.</p>
<p>When the ACC decided to become a Big time football conference like the SEC by expanding to 12 teams, Duke balked and some thought it might leave the conference since it did not want to be perceived as a big time Southern Football School like Alabama, Florida or Texas A&M. For years the team was 1-10 and 0-11. But the decision to embrace Big Time Football and compete like other southern (ACC/SEC) schools has sure paid off. The team winning several games this year has apparently paid big dividends in the admissions department. Look at the way USC has moved up in the last decade. Who’d ever figure that Big time football was so important in the academic world.</p>
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<p>So the implication there is: it’s game theory gone horribly wrong!</p>
<p>Duke’s ED acceptance rate is ~35%. Lots of non-ivy caliber applicants figured they’d take a shot this year.</p>
<p>Despite Duke’s yield protection measures (relatively non-selective ED process and merit/athletic scholarships), it still can manage to keep only ~40% of its admits.</p>
<p>I’d say it’s a combination of what ChoklitRain (post #5) and interestingguy (post #8) said. In 2009, Duke got only 1,537 ED applications, out of a total of 23,877 undergrad applications. That means ED apps represented only about 6.4% of the total.</p>
<p>In contrast Columbia (the nearest Ivy ahead of Duke in the rankings) got a similar number of total apps, 22,485, but 2,942 of those (13.1%) were ED apps—very nearly twice as many ED apps as Duke. </p>
<p>A 35% increase off a small base is a small absolute increase. In Duke’s case, a 35% increase in ED apps would mean about 540 more ED apps, which will almost certainly leave them still well behind Columbia both in the total number of ED apps and in ED as a percentage of total apps. What would account for such a shift? Well, possibly as interestingguy suggests, a few hundred more people noticed that Duke’s ED acceptance rate last year was 35%, at a time when acceptance rates at many of the Ivies have dropped to single digits. So if you want to be able to claim that you go to a US News top 10 school, your safest bet is either Duke ED or Chicago ED. It’s not clear the addition of 540 applicants to Duke’s ED pool portends anything at all about the size of its RD pool. It could be these additional ED apps are coming out of what would otherwise be Duke’s RD pile. Have to wait and see what the RD total is before concluding it’s anything more than a small statistical blip.</p>
<p>"I wouldn’t call Duke football a “big athletic experience” just yet, particularly compared with other schools in the south. There is still a LOT of work to be done there.</p>
<p>Also, the majority of Duke’s students come from regions other than the Southeast. It is very much a Yankee school."</p>
<p>We’re very happy with the progress Duke is making and the fact that our STUDENT-athletes are great people. Why don’t you worry about the “student”-athletes on the dUNCe football teams who get arrested for assaulting teammates during practices (Donte Moss), assaulting females (Kevin Bryant), having illegal drugs (Anthony Elzy), attempting to buy alcohol illegally (Casey Barth & Grant Schallock), and attemping to obtain alcohol with another person’s driver’s license (Casey Barth)?! dUNCe obviously “has a lot of work” to do to get quality people in their program instead of the ghetto and trailer park thugs they currently have…</p>
<p>With 86% of the students from coming North Carolina, dUNCe is obviously just a mecca for the finest NASCAR fans from the best trailer parks in the state of North Carolina!</p>
<p>Hey Dookie, how’s Jersey this time of year? Guido Beach looking alright? Don’t be jealous because UNC has the perfect balance of academics and athletics. In life there are winners and there are losers-it sucks that Duke has been on the losing end of…pretty much everything for the past decade, but maybe you’ll start bucking the trend eventually.</p>
<p>I saw one of your recruits has a GPA of 2.2 and an ACT score of 15. Great standards you have there. Hey, with great guys like Harrison Barnes coming to UNC its not surprising that you have to dig at the bottom of the barrel.</p>
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Aside from the fact that the only top 10 schools with ED are Penn, Columbia, and Duke (i.e. not Chicago), I find that line of thinking pathetic in the extreme. </p>
<p>I’ve come to the conclusion that, quite frankly, most applicants to top schools are not nearly as savvy as they fancy themselves to be. I include most CC posters in this. </p>
<p>Seeking to get a jump on other applicants, students have started applying ED in increasing droves. Predictably, ED rates have plummeted, and SCEA at Yale and Stanford has nearly halved to the point where there is almost discernible difference in RD and SCEA admit rates. The same holds for RD and ED at Brown. Yeah…so much for strategy, guys.</p>
<p>Their other method, shotgunning applications everywhere in the hopes of securing a prestigious admit letter, has similarly backfired as admit rates continue to fall, thus creating a positive feedback spiral of hypercompetitive admissions and increasing application numbers.</p>
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Most of the top 20-25 schools, from Vanderbilt all the way up to Harvard, boast “Ivy-caliber” applicants. It’s more a matter of how many of those applicants are admitted.</p>
<p>RE: post #11</p>
<p>"Yet the most elite recruits (read: prospective basketball players) can be tentatively admitted before they’ve finished their junior year of high school; all that’s needed is a PSAT score and freshman and sophomore grades. </p>
<p>This must have been how our beloved Sean Dockery got admitted with a 2.3 GPA and an ACT score of 15; at the time, his credentials didn’t even meet NCAA minimums of a 2.5 GPA and 17 on the ACT. </p>
<p>Which brings me to my point: Although I, too, will never forget the night Sean Dockery beat VT, this snapshot of our admissions process is a University-wide disgrace." </p>
<p>(Duke Chronicle) </p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/duke-university/251415-duke-athlete-admissions.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/duke-university/251415-duke-athlete-admissions.html</a></p>
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<p>prospective students /= admitted students</p>
<p>Cuse, you need to be more worried about Kansas and Memphis this year than Duke. Pick on a team your own size. ;)</p>
<p>What about Brown’s 21% increase? Considering last year we had a decrease of a couple of percent for ED and then a 21% increase in RD applications, I’m thinking we may end up below 10% acceptance this year.</p>
<p>Not sure what has happened in two years to make things jump so much.</p>
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<p>I go to UNC, not Cuse, and we’re plenty big enough for Duke, Kansas, and Memphis. :)</p>
<p>I just hope Duke becomes more selective than Penn. Luckily Penn’s admissions director Furda appears to be terrible at his job so my dream should become a reality…</p>
<p>^ Furda did a great job at columbia, and has increased Penn’s ED apps by 6% this year, which in reality amounts to an increase in applicants similar to the one Duke saw, considering Penn gets the most ED apps of any school in the country</p>
<p>I knew I’d see interestingguy ■■■■■■■■ on here as he always does on anything duke-related…</p>
<p>I think it has to due with a) ed to a top ten school, so either Duke, Penn, or Columbia
b) duke gets fewer apps than say, Penn
c) Duke’s new recrutment methods?</p>