Overall for Northwestern is 13% but ED is 35%??? Why is there so much of a difference? Any conjecture? I highly doubt that the difference between pools is so different between NU and other peer schools like Cornell/ Vanderbilt.
Northwestern likes students who love Northwestern. Nearly half of their class is accepted ED. In addition, ED pools are typically more competitive (there aren’t students in ED pools that are rushing to take their SAT once more or need the fall to boost their GPA). It just shows how incredibly cutthroat RD is.
First the ED rate includes athletes, legacy etc. And a number of schools choose to accept a good portion of the class ED because they are basically “locked into” attending.
ED shows strong demonstrated interest as it is binding. It increases the school’s yield (%of admitted students that actually attend) which may have something to do with their ranking.
There’s a pretty big difference at Cornell as well between ED and RD.
ED also consists of students willing to commit without comparing financial aid offers. So the school can load up the class with a lot of students paying list price.
Why? Much of Fall and Spring in Chicago are colder than Winter elsewhere - even Ithaca, NY.
It helps tremendously with their ‘yield’ % and that is a data point important to most colleges. In general, you will see ED rates of acceptance much higher than RD rates at most colleges. Might not be the same for EA, but for ED it is generally true
Why do think NW is way different from others? The regular versus ED admission percentage for Penn is 10% v. 25%, Dartmouth 11% v. 28%, Columbia 7% v. 20%, Brown 8% v.18%, Cornell 14% v. 28%, Johns Hopkins 15% v. 33%. E.g., the Columbia ED admission rate is almost 3 times its regular admission rate, making it an even bigger multiple difference than NW. Having a much higher ED admission than regular admission rate is a common occurrence for colleges, and NW suffers from the disease of padding its yield rate no worse than those others.
Many colleges handsomely reward ED applicants with a substantially higher admission rate. This is not unique to NU; it is not unusual at all.
I suspect the reason that the differential between the qualifications of the ED and RD admits is somewhat larger than it is for the Ivys and Hopkins, U of C, MIT and other schools of that ilk including some of the most competitive LACs, is that Northwestern has to field Big Ten teams. Ivy League, and certainly division III athletes don’t have to be as skilled.
@maof4, I’m not sure how that affects non-athletes. BTW, one consequence of offering no athletic scholarship (like the Ivies) is that many more players drop a sport, which means that an Ivy usually admits twice as many football players per class as Northwestern.
agree, a lot of schools’ early admit rates are 2x or 3x higher, but it’s a different pool of people. includes people recruited for sports or other stuff (fine arts), and a self-selected group who are willing to make binding commitment. so mean grades/scores may be different.
Northwestern’s peers schools (JHU, Cornell, etc.) have similar rates of ED vs RD percentages. In schools where interest is important or has incredibly competitive admissions (or both), the difference is larger.