<p>Stanford is a bad choice, because I think it follows normal Division I practice and signs letters of intent, so (unlike many other selective schools, most of which are D-III or Ivy) recruited athletes aren’t necessarily part of the early acceptance pool. If they were, however . . . 175 out of 700 or so SCEA admits is a pretty big chunk. </p>
<p>This year, Stanford accepted about 700 students SCEA, out of about 5,400 applicants, for a nearly 13% admission rate. If you back 150 athletes out of that, you would get 550 admits out of 5,250 applicants, or 10.5%. That was not a whole lot higher than their previous year’s overall rate, 9.5%, and meaningfully closer to this year’s eventual 8% rate.</p>
<p>Dartmouth accepted 400 students from 1,600 ED applications. Do you think 100 of them were recruited athletes? (Every athlete I’ve seen recruited to Dartmouth was ED, but it’s not a big sample size for me.) That’s the difference between a 20% admit rate and a 25% admit rate, and would account for 40% of the difference between the ED admit rate and the overall rate.</p>
<p>65 were legacies. It’s kind of hard to analyze legacies, because they don’t have a 100% (or close to it) admit rate like athletic recruits, and because their grades/scores don’t differ from the general population of acceptees much if at all. </p>
<p>In general, it’s not very meaningful to say that the stats for the ED admittees are the same as for the enrolled class. First, Dartmouth could probably admit four or five classes with the exact same numerical profile. The edge comes in getting to be in the class with that profile that is actually accepted, not the other ones that could have been accepted. Second, the stats for the enrolled class are systematically lower than the stats for the accepted class. Students with better stats tend to have more competing choices, so they don’t show up in the final enrolled class in the same numbers.</p>
<p>Even though the “borderline” students know about the boost ED offers for some of the top schools, they may be held back by an internal struggle. </p>
<p>Finaid consideration aside, I suspect the biggest issue for these kids is whether they believe they are leaving something on the table by committing themselves to a school that may give them the best chance of breaking into the big league, but not their first choice school.</p>
<p>An admission officer at Emory told us that there is only a 3% differential between ED and RD. She said that there is virtually no difference in the ‘quality’ of applicants between ED and RD. However, she did say that ED gives an applicant a little boost because it shows that the student is committed to Emory. My take on that is the boost goes to those few students who are right on the edge of the acceptance border.</p>
<p>Our GC recommends ED if the student is 100% sure that they want to attend the school. The problem is you can’t change your mind once you get accepted and some kids will change their minds as they go through the process.</p>
<p>She did recommend that all students get their applicants in as early as possible. Her reasoning is that the admission process can get harder the more applications an adcom has to process and if you wait until the last minute the adcoms are pretty tired of looking at applications at that point. Makes sense to me.</p>
<p>^^Emory offers both EDI and EDII. I firmly believe that Emory’s ED1 program has a similar acceptance rate as Cornell, which is significantly higher than EDII. Since Emory clearly states on their website that demonstrated interest is a factor in admissions, and ED1 is the ultimate demonstration of interest…</p>
<p>Oops, I meant to say EA for BC. At any rate they do seem to be the exception to the “earlier is better” rule and they make no bones about it, although apparently some people don’t pay attention to the warnings!</p>
<p>Followup to JHS’s post on Dartmouth. I found more numbers for the class of 2012:</p>
<p>
found at: [Dartmouth</a> College Office of Alumni Relations: Enrollment and Admissions Committee News](<a href=“Dartmouth Alumni”>Dartmouth Alumni)</p>
<p>400 students eventually were admitted ED for class of 2012, so a rate of 28%. Of these, 65 were legacies, a 47% success rate. Assuming that around 90% of the recruited athletes were admitted, that’s 135 students. (I seem to recall the number published as 130 actual admits, though I can’t find the source. Still, that makes an athlete acceptance rate of 85-90% quite plausible.) So that uses up half of the 400 offers just for athletes and legacies. Although I realize there could be students in multiple categories, let’s just assume those 200 offers had to be spread around the other 1145 applicants, including development admits, URMs, others recruited for special talent. The acceptance rate for this group is 17%, not 28%. </p>
<p>Footnote: after RD results were in, there were 125 legacies in the class, so 60 more got in during the RD round.</p>
<p>Maybe but the admission officer last Saturday was * very* clear that admission rate was only 3% higher in ED vs RD. She seemed to imply that while it is great that a student demonstrates commitment by applying ED and they take that into consideration, it’s not going to give you a significant advantage over RD. In other words, if you couldn’t get in RD, don’t count on trying to bypass their admission standards by applying ED. That’s just the impression I got by hearing it first person from someone who reviews admissions applications for Emory.</p>
<p>Most schools do give a boost for ED. Some school straight out tell you so. There are schools that deny it and say that the higher accept rates are due to self selection. There are also schools where the rates are close.</p>
<p>Other than the most selective schools, I think ED makes a definite difference. The yield is something that admissions always watches carefully. In times when kids are applying to so many more schools that it is difficult to tell who is going to show up, the commitment is soothing to the admissions folks.</p>