Is there an advantage in applying ED to Williams?

Mwfan1921
Sat, 29 Jun 2019 15:44:14 +0000

If not recruited, OP’s XC experience will be considered an EC, similar to band, etc.

ED odds are probably higher than RD, even after stripping out recruited athletes, URMs/Questbridge and legacy/donor connected applicants, but it is difficult to guesstimate the degree of advantage.

@HPTD12 wrote:

Some base assumptions: 30% of Williams students are athletes and 3/4 of the athletes are admitted ED. That means of 550 entering freshmen, about 123 are athletes admitted ED.

So the ED admit rate of non-athletes would be 132/565 = 23%

This estimate of 123 recruited athletes is too high. NESCAC schools get 14 football slots, 2 for every other sport. Williams has 30 sports, so that’s a max of 72 slots. Various reports over the years from the Williams Record and Ephblog suggest that Williams limits the slots beyond the maximum allowed by the conference…one article cites only 66 slots are typically allowed per year. Many student-athletes walk-on to Williams teams (were not recruited athletes)…that’s how the teams get filled out and total estimate of athletes at Williams ranges from 30%-40%.

These estimates also do not take into account URMs/Questbridge/WOW attendees and legacy/connected donor applicants…and these students are a significant proportion of those accepted. We don’t have the ED/RD breakdowns, but 254 Class of 2023 acceptances across both ED and RD were from Questbridge (254/1,205 or 21% of total acceptances). Another 139 acceptances were from WOW attendees (11.5% of total acceptances). https://communications.williams.edu/news-releases/3_19_2019_class2023/

These numbers (32.5% of total acceptances were just QB and WOW, about another 5-6% athletes and some % of legacy/donor kids) illustrate how difficult it is for an unhooked applicant to be accepted to Williams, whether ED or RD.