I think word might be getting around that Middlebury fills almost its entire entering class in ED. Seems hardly worth it to apply RD, and perhaps the numbers show that.
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I note also that Middlebury, like all of its peers, has recently admitted many more people RD than it did ED, but then its RD yield has been such that it enrolls more people ED than RD.
So obviously this is a big if, but if Middlebury was getting fewer throw-in RD applications, but as a result the remaining RD applicants were more likely to yield if admitted, this would not necessarily be bad at all from Middleburyâs perspective.
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But how many NESCACs get âthrowaway applicationsâ? An American college or university would have to be a household name in order to attract enough"drive by" or âcrap shootâ or âthrowawayâ applications to move the needle one way or the other. In fact, if you examine the history of Early Decision, one of the discoveries youâll find is that it was invented by the so-called little ivies in order to level the playing field against the Ivy League which had become one of the most successful branding campaigns of the 20th Century by the time the Baby Boom arrived at its doorstep in the early sixties.
To put it another way, NESCAC has been operating at the retail level while the Big Ivies have been wholesale operations for decades.
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So I donât know if any NESCAC college has been as transparent about this as, say, Yale. In fact, I am not sure any other prominent university has been as transparent as Yale. But we can at least do a numerical comparison.
The sort of Yale statement I am referring to is this (from their Admissions Podcast, in the context of explaining why they adopted an initial screening phase):
MARK: Iâll say it very plainly. We have more uncompetitive and sort of unqualified applicants in our first-year admissions process now than we did not even all that long ago. So I started reading admissions files about 15 years ago. We had about 26,000 applications, just about half what we have now, and I donât think that this kind of Initial Review process would have worked in that stage. I think there would just be so many more of the applicants who would be so competitive that it kind of wouldnât be worth your time to be adding this initial step because you just wouldnât wind up identifying that many students who werenât really competitive in the process. That has changed.
OK, from what I can tell Mark is referring to the cycle reported in the 2009-10 CDS, when Yale got 26003 applications, as compared to for the Class of 2027, where it got 52303 applicants.
So, taking Middlebury, in their 2009-10 CDS, it got 6904 applications. It reported for the Class of 2027, it got 13297 applications. That is just short of the same sort of doubling of applications that Yale saw over this same period.
So obviously this is an inference on my part, but I think it is a good bet that Middlebury has seen something very similar to what Mark was describing at Yale.
Indeed, I think it is worth knowing that the underlying pool of highly competitive applicants has not doubled in size since the 2009-10 cycle. In fact, the domestic US pool since then has if anything declined in size.
For the more national schools this effect may have been offset by an increase in the percentage of people applying nationally and not just regionally or in-state, and also an increasingly competitive international applicant pool. Although that latter subject is complicatedâwithout going into a whole long thesis, Yale has also suggested at times a good portion of the increase in uncompetitive applicants is happening among the international applicants.
So what Mark said happened at Yale makes sense because it was not plausible the competitive applicant pool doubled since the 2009-10 cycle, or really increased anything more than marginally.
And that is equally true for Middlebury, which saw nearly the same sort of doubling. It really isnât plausible they saw a proportionate increase in competitive applications, not even close.
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I think youâre moving the goalposts a little bit. Or perhaps I misunderstood the original point you were making. I took âthrowaway applicationsâ as another way of describing âdrive-byâ applications. Youâre literally calling them garbage applications.
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So I think kaslew and I were actually making somewhat different but related points. What I was just talking about is really more directly supportive of kaslewâs point, but then still indirectly related to mine.
kaslew referred to âunrealistic applications,â which I at least interpreted as equivalent to Mark-at-Yaleâs phrase âuncompetitive and sort of unqualified applicants.â Again there are some inferences involved, but I believe it very likely Middlebury has in fact seen a large increase in such applications in recent years.
My point was about what I called âthrow-inâ applications (I note I didnât use âthrowawayâ, although depending what you mean by that it could mean essentially the same thing). By that I mean applications where someone just adds Middlebury to an already long application list without a lot of care going into evaluating whether the applicant is really a good fit for Middlebury, and vice-versa whether Middlebury was really a good fit for the applicant.
So that is not quite the same thing, but the concepts are related because one of the logical consequences of more throw-in applications is likely more of them would be unrealistic/uncompetitive applications, due to the failure of the applicant to carefully evaluate whether they were actually a good fit for Middlebury.
I, though, was then more focusing on the second prong of that, the failure to evaluate if Middlebury was really a good fit for the applicant. Meaning hypothetically, at least, there could be cases where from what Middlebury sees in the written application, the applicant appears very well-qualified and so Middlebury admits them, but the applicant has actually done very little to determine if Middlebury is really a good fit for them. I note as an aside that Middlebury currently does not have any sort of supplemental essay requirement, including no âWhy this college?â essay.
Again this is speculative, but if Middlebury was experiencing an increase in âthrow-inâ applications of that type, then that would be contributing to their observably low RD yields. And they might well prefer NOT to get applications of that type, which would likely help them manage their admission offers to get the best possible enrolled classes.
OK, so is there any evidence to support that hypothesis? Yes, actually.
Going back to the the 2009-10 CDS, Middlebury admitted 285 ED. ED yield is usually not quite 100% for various reasons, so I would estimate that yielded maybe 275 enrollees. It then admitted 1128 non-ED, and enrolled 604 total, so I would estimate about 329 enrolled non-ED. That works out to a non-ED yield of about 29.2%.
OK, so same math in the 2022-23 CDS. 439 ED admits, so I would estimate around 425 ED enrollees. 1205 non-ED admits, 639 total enrollees, estimated 214 non-ED enrollees, that works out to about a 17.8% non-ED yield.
OK, so in a period where application volumes at Middlebury were up a lot, non-ED yield dropped a lot. This is not definitive proof, because a lot else is going onâincluding that if more high-interest applicants are applying ED at Middlebury these days, that would also drive down RD yields. Still, this evidence is at least consistent with the hypothesis that more throw-in applications as I defined them have led to lower RD yields at Middlebury.
So ifâand as I mentioned, this is a big ifâthat is part of what is happening, again Middlebury might well appreciate a decline in throw-in applications. It might like that both for administrative convenience, and it might also improve their RD yield, and both of those things could help Middlebury better achieve the enrolled classes it really wants.
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I see.
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Very complicated, of course, and Middlebury is not exactly showing its cards.
As an aside, I note back in that 2009-10 CDS, you end up with maybe 275/604 enrollees being ED admits, so 45.5%.
Same math in the 2022-23 CDS, you end up with 425/639, so 66.5%. This is the sort of observation some people are suggesting means applying RD to Middlebury is becoming pointless.
However, in the 2022-23 CDS, Middlebury actually admitted more people non-ED, 1205, than it did in 2009-10, 1128. I think this sort of observation contradicts some peopleâs intuitions about how all this should be working, but again it is pretty obvious why when you dig into the numbersâtheir non-ED yield dropping so much means they actually have to admit more people RD even though they have fewer enrollment slots to fill RD.
Now of course another relevant fact is in the 2009-10 CDS, that was 1128 non-ED admits out of 5935 non-ED applications (19.0%), whereas in 2022-23 it was 1205 non-ED admits out of 11913 non-ED applications (10.1%).
But then here is the Big Questionâhow many of those additional non-ED applications were actually realistic, competitive applications, rather than unrealistic/uncompetitive applications?
And I donât know, but I strongly suspect the non-ED admission rate for actually realistic, competitive applications to Middlebury has not dropped by something like half. Maybe some, but I really doubt it is anything close to that much.
And not at Yale either, for that matter.
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Full stop. You donât know.
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OK, but in many, many situations, people have to make important decisions without knowing everything they would like to know. So instead of knowing, they have to substitute their best analysis that stops short of certainty.
I of course wish these colleges gave us full insight into what is actually happening with their applications and admissions, but for various reasons they do not. Nonetheless, people have to make decisions about where to apply, whether or not to apply ED or RD, and so on. And so this is one of those extremely common situations where we just have to do our best with highly imperfect information.
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Iâve actually lost the point we started out discussing. I believe it had something to do with whether having a decline in RD applications was actually a blessing in disguise because it could possibly mean that the college had fewer frivolous applications to deal with. My suspicion, in the case of Middlebury is that it was the result of some unpleasant publicity surrounding the Charles Murray demonstration that is still a major topic in the conservative echo chamber. Thatâs a historical artifact. People can do with it what they want.
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Completely agree. To my knowledge Middlebury has not really done anything well-publicized to discourage frivolous applications, and if something else was discouraging applications (and I agree your suggestion is plausible), it might not be just discouraging the frivolous ones.
So while I did agree it would be good for Middlebury if a reduction in frivolous applications happened, to my knowledge that would be just a version of what I would call âdumb luckâ.
I know several people who applied to Middlebury bc they deemed it prestigious enough and there is no extra work. These werenât through away in the sense they were not competitive. OTOH, we are not bothering this time around because they WL the strongest applicants from our school.
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According to SCOIR, they have been doing the same with the applicants from our feederish HS. We do have some admits, but I suspect most of those are recruited athletes. Still, there is exactly one higher numbers RD admit in the database, so maybe that was an exception.
Unfortunately we do not have enough data for SCOIR to report for all the individuals NESCAC SLACs, but we do have most. And Amherst, for example, looks completely normalâa decent hit rate in a very high GPA/Test box, and then a couple more admits scattered around who I would guess were recruited or otherwise hooked. Bowdoin, Colby, Connecticut (quite a bit more generous), Hamilton, Trinity (again more generous), Wesleyan, all basically as expected. Bates is a little funky (one waitlisting that was numerically stronger than the admits) . . . but nothing like Middlebury.
On the topic of record numbers of applications to NESCAC schools, Wesleyan got a record number of ED apps, according to the Argus: The Wesleyan Argus | Office of Admission Releases Early Decision Data; Implications of SCOTUS Affirmative Action Decision Remain Unclear
As discussed on a Wesleyan thread, this article is a little weird, in that it includes an incomplete data set. But it does provide the number of ED2 acceptances (135), which is in line with historical data. And I know from a friend whose child was accepted ED1 that there were ~300 accepted, and Wesâs social media announced 49 QB admits. So that means about 485 admitted early, which is in line with historical numbers and taken together aligns with the Argusâs conclusion that this was a particularly competitive ED cycle.
My kidâs ED2 acceptance letter (which I donât have in front of me, so this is from memory) included a prediction that this will be one of the most competitive years for acceptance everâvague but worded in such a way as to suggest that they received high numbers of RD apps, as well.
So seems like Wes is in line with the trend at other NESCACs.
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Wow, thatâs seems like a huge number of QB admits. Does anyone know historical QB numbers for Wes? I expect Wes is using QB to help maintain/increase FGLI/URM numbers, which would make sense.
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I went through the numbers earlier this year and most schools increased their QB matches by ~30% this year. I took that as a consequence of the AA changes.
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According to this (Class Profile, Admission & Aid - Wesleyan University), last year they had 19 QB matches (which I believe means early) and 101 admitted overall.
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Thanks. Iâve seen some other increases that large as well, but sadly many schools donât routinely share their QB data (or number of students coming thru other college access org partnerships).
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Good find, thanks for sharing that Wes picked up another 82 QB students in RD. Will see if they increase that this year too.
- 101 are QuestBridge College Match Finalists, 19 of whom were admitted through the match process (fifteenth year in partnership with QuestBridge)
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