Yes, but none of ours this year were athletes. I don’t know if they had any other hooks.
(Vs Stanford where our 3 admits were all hooked (2 athletes, one double legacy). Of course they don’t do ED.)
I note Hopkins along with Chicago is one the highest US News-ranked colleges that nonetheless supposedly has historically had a yield problem, which they may well be using ED to try to address.
I note this doesn’t actually mean the unhooked applicants who are getting into these places ED are less competitive than their RD admits. I think sometimes people hope an ED “boost” will work that way, that it will get them in despite a not fully competitive application. But my sense is with colleges like this, they will go ahead and just reject (or defer then reject) those sorts of ED applicants.
And in fact, when I compared the test and GPA profiles of ED admits versus RD admits at these sorts of colleges for S24’s feederish HS, the ED admits did not have notably worse averages, indeed if anything they were sometimes a bit better.
But among the actually competitive applicants? Maybe the hit rate goes up, even if the standards don’t go down. Maybe.
I think there are a lot of ED athletes, legacies, other hooks that are as qualified as other applicants, but by using ED they know they get in when the pools are so competitive. For the applicant, going ED is a way to break the tie with another RD applicant who is also very qualified but if there is only one space, it might be filled by the ED applicant.
And there are a few athletes like the kid I know who had absolutely no chance at JHU without the athletic advantage. The perfect stats applicant and the athlete recruit acceptances in ED go into the same stats, that they were admitted through ED.
2 Likes
I absolutely don’t think ED helps a candidate who is not fully competitive. We all know these schools are inundated with excellent students with great ECs. I think it gives those students a boost - which varies by school. I did the math 7 years ago to try and pull out athletic recruits (other hooked are harder to quantify) and was seeing things like 4-5% RD going to 10%-15%. Still a reach by any measure, but a meaningful difference. Things have changed dramatically since then with COVID and test optional differences, so not sure how things look more recently.
2 Likes
I think it might make a small difference at schools where yield might be an issue.
But for those schools who fill a significant portion of their class ED, the simple math of less places available for the rest of the competitive candidates who apply RD must factor in as well?
1 Like
I was curious so went back to maia. The lowest gpa admit at JHU from our school (past 3 years) was 3.93, so if any of those admits were hooked, it wasn’t obvious from their stats.
1 Like
You have to be careful with this, because RD yields being lower than ED yields means you can still be talking about more RD admissions even when you have lower RD enrollments.
So Middlebury, for example, reported in their 2025-26 CDS they had 460 ED admits. Assuming something like 97% enrolled (this is based on cases where colleges actually reported ED yield), that would be about 446. Out of the total enrolled of 634, that is about 70% (I did not so randomly choose Middlebury, as it is one of the colleges people often name where this happens).
However, Middlebury reported 1511 admits, and so 460 ED admits is only about 30% of total admits.
You can then estimate there were about 188 non-ED enrollees, out of 1051 non-ED admits, so about an 18% non-ED yield.
None of this really answers what the marginal unhooked ED admit versus non-ED admit actually looked like at Middlebury.
But it does illustrate that thanks to often fairly low non-ED yields, even though ED enrollees may end up most of the enrolled class, ED offers may only be a much smaller percentage of total offers.
1 Like
And I said that most of the athletes, even if ED, are highly qualified for the schools at the top of the food chain that they are going to (JHU, Duke, Yale) but they apply ED to get the coach’s support and the ‘sure’ admit. I think athletes get a bad rep of getting in just because they can shoot or jump or throw when many are top students and would have been admitted in RD.
But if there are ED athletes, legacies, or other hooks who might be a sliver below the most qualified, their stats are reported in the ED pool, including the stat of how many ED applicants were admitted.
Can applying ED help get a kid right on the edge in? I think so, even if it is because the AO has more time to read the apps in Dec and see something special on that app. Some schools say it does help and some say no, so I guess you have to decide if the school you are applying ED to does or doesn’t give a boost to ED apps.
I was responding to this:
Anyway I don’t know about past years, but I can see this year that none of the ED JHU admits at our school are athletes.