@cquin85 - I think this is the point in the movie when someone throws a rock through the window with a note tied to it saying, “Lay off Colby or the kid gets it!” 
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Y’all. Hamilton has a whole Jan admission section on its website. From their own page:
Congratulations on being offered a spot in Hamilton’s “Jan” class. The following information may be helpful as you consider the opportunity to participate in Hamilton’s January Admission Program.
- Hamilton welcomes approximately 40-45 new first-year students each January. Because a large percentage of Hamilton students study abroad or away during the spring of their junior year, we typically have space available to offer January admission to qualified students whom we would not be able to accommodate in the fall.
- After determining who will be offered fall admission (based on the number of available spots in the class), the admission committee is able to offer admission to several dozen more candidates whose academic and personal qualifications are strong and compelling, and whose demonstrated independence and intellectual curiosity lead us to believe they will make good use of the fall semester.
- Hamilton “Jans” have done virtually anything and everything in the fall, from community service and travel to outdoor adventures and full-time work. Many students pursue credit-bearing opportunities at an accredited institution or a partner program and earn transfer credits so they can graduate after three-and-a-half years at Hamilton. Others have used AP credit and summer coursework to make on-time graduation possible. The majority of students who join the Hamilton community in January graduate with the rest of their class.
Based on the 23/24 CDS their overall yield was around 40%. Let’s assume the yield for Jan admits is a bit lower, 25%, since it is a different start date. So let’s say they offer Jan admission to 180 people, expecting to enroll 45. if we add that 180 to the number of accepted students for fall starts, the acceptance rate overall changes from 12% to 13.8%.
Hamilton 23/24 CDS
At the end of the day, Jan admits graduate with the exact same degree that Fall start folks do. If you are a prospective applicant interested in a school like Hamilton, or Colby, or Middlebury, you should for sure check out the CDS and the desired qualities of an admitted student–and prepare yourself for the possibility that you might be offered a Spring start. I really don’t think doing a deep dive into the specific stats of Spring start admits would give an applicant enough information to game the system, any more than diving into the specific stats of unhooked ED/REA applicants allows you to game the system. If you are a competitive applicant for a highly selective school you have to be prepared for the fact that institutional priorities vary cohort to cohort, and may end up contributing to whether or not you are a offered a space in Fall, Spring or not at all.
(form the parent of aHamilton Jan admit who applied ED I, was thrilled to be offered Jan, is a high stats kid with unique life experiences, and received a large need-based financial aid package)
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So, what does that mean for the non-fall admit? We didn’t have room for you in the fall because the people we admitted instead of you are using up all the space. But wait! Some of them are leaving. So now we have room.
It’s all good. Sounds totally legitimate. So why not just put that group together and share data for the cohort? I don’t understand.
And just to say it again, I don’t think there is anything inherently or necessarily negative or sneaky about any of this. It just mystifies me why people, and here of all places, wouldn’t want to know the profiles of the “other” track of admissions at these various schools. If they are identical to (and heck, maybe even more accomplished than) the fall cohort, then great! Just show it.
Alternatively, CDS can drop the fall start date limiter and ask for the consolidated profile of students admitted in 202X - 202Y school year.
If I were a strong student with great stats that are perhaps just off the mark of the typical fall admit, I’d want to know if there was an alternative admissions track for people with slightly lower stats so I could better handicap my chances.
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Sure, it’d be great to see them. But let’s just try this as a thought experiment.
The person responsible for this exercise has to do it in the fall.
When a new student enrolls, everything about them is uploaded into the database. Hence, the ones who join the class in the spring aren’t in it.
The data preparer does this by using the data in the enrolled student database to ensure it’s accurate, verifiable, and will match any other survey/census work they have to do.
To try to capture students who have not yet enrolled is not easy or accurate and maybe less consistent year over year. So everyone just follows the instructions and uses students who matriculated in the fall and are enrolled, can answer the question about living on campus, etc.
As you might have guessed in this fixation on process, my job has included this kind of institutional reporting and it is a miserable task. More than miserable! It’s critical that one work with a database that will have the fewest categorization changes from year to year. To compare organizations, it’s key that they have as little leeway as possible to call the same thing something different.
There might be interesting info in here or there may not. We don’t know that these kids couldn’t be admitted in fall because they were lower stat kids, we just know the school couldn’t give them beds in the fall. do know that they persist and graduate from these schools, often in 3.5 years, so can do the work.
I get that you feel there is something here. But for 30-40 kids a year, I can also imagine it may open a whole different can of worms.
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I don’t think we’re adding anything new to the topic, which at this point I think has reached diminishing returns. I just don’t agree with much of what you’re saying here, which, if I were to boil it down to its essence, is “it’s really hard to provide the data and there’s probably nothing there. oh, and these kids do just fine.”
Unless there is something you’re not telling me, it seems that you are still making assumptions about cohort profiles to which you don’t have access. It doesn’t matter how hard it is. Admission information is critical to these institutions. It’s among their most important metrics. I understand very well the point of maintaining consistent categories for data gathering, but that doesn’t mean you cannot ever make tweaks. It wouldn’t be year to year. It would be this one change this year going forward.
And for the last time, I know that I don’t know that these kids couldn’t be admitted. And I know why I don’t know. But given the circumstances of their admission, it is an entirely fair question to ask whether their stats, or something else about them, stands out as different from the fall cohort. As to that cohort’s ability to persist and graduate early and all of those other things, again, that is just not the topic here. Athletes persist and graduate and enjoy all kinds of success at the schools to which they are recruited, and we still wonder what % of the ED class they take up. All fair questions. This is no different. It is a separate and unique “track” for admission.
I was a Jan admit at a school, but I wasn’t a semester late, I was a semester early. I hadn’t even applied with the fall kids, hadn’t taken the SAT or ACT. So the school would have had to do the stats for the fall starters, redone them for the fall kids who wanted to/had to wait until Jan, and then redone them again for new additions like me.
Schools still do this. USC has a lot of their athletes graduate from hs early and start in the spring even though their sport doesn’t start until the fall. I really have no idea if their stats are included in the fall starts either since they aren’t new freshmen. I think the school just figures it is 100 so it won’t change things much.
If USNWR or the CDS asks for the stats in Nov, do the schools have to redo them in Feb or March? When are the CDS stats published? Would they be helpful for seniors applying if they are delayed 4-5 months to add the Jan/Feb starts?
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Thanks for the perspective! I hadn’t even thought of the possibility of athletes starting early at LAC’s, as they do at many D-1 schools.
In your experience, were many of the Jan starts at your school also athletes?
Every (or a very strong majority) power 5 program in the country has their football players start early for spring practice if they are able and willing. Nothing unique to USC. And I’ve addressed now several times how you’d deal with that.
As for LACs, I am not aware of a practice of athletes starting in the spring of the school year prior to the fall class. It’s possible but I’ve never heard of it.
In any case, if some of the statistics aren’t timely or helpful on the margin for one particular band of applicants, then so be it. It’s still there for the next band of potentials to look at and evaluate.
As for the chore of recalculation, then don’t do it on a composite basis. Go with my original suggestion and break them out and update the profile when you have them. If the numbers are as insignificant as you say, how hard can this be?
I answered your questions, so please answer mine: why are we working so hard here to avoid disclosure? There is a group of admits - people who got the “yes” as opposed to the “no” - whose data is locked in a closet.
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I don’t know how or when colleges report to the CDS or if there is a way for them to update the info once it is submitted. Can the schools just wait until March or April to submit once a year? I don’t know. It wouldn’t bother me if they were updated, but then every school should be required to update all the numbers so that people know that they are comparing School A with spring admits v School B with only fall admits. The information should be standard across all schools.
Of course the schools can update and post on their own webpages. As you say, if it is so easy to do it why don’t they just do it? It appears some of the schools do (like Hamilton mentioned above). I didn’t care if it was a 10% admit rate in the fall v. a 10.1% if you also included the spring admits. It seems to be really important to you so you so let the schools know that. Ask them why they don’t include the spring admits in the CDS numbers. One thing I would have liked on the CDS was the racial breakdown of the entire student body, not just the domestic students. Only domestic students are included is because that’s what the Dept of Ed requires, but since I have a child who could benefit by seeing other students who looked like her, whether they are from NY or CA or China or England, it would have been nice to have that number. Schools don’t report it to the CDS because they aren’t asked for that information. That was a box on the chart that we couldn’t rely on the CDS for, so had to find that information on our own. The CDS can’t be the perfect source for everyone.
I don’t think the schools report the updated spring admit numbers to USNWR or the CDS because I don’t think the schools are asked for them. Are any of the CDS numbers updated in the spring? Number of students, male/female ratio, new scholarships awarded? I didn’t study the CDS enough to notice or compare.
Just to clarify, I don’t care that much about any of this because my kids are out of college (almost) and if I’m blessed to be alive when my grandchildren are going through it, I am confident that their parents will be able to navigate their way through this without need of the information. Like 90% of the banter on CC, I’m just putting in my $0.02 on something that, in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t really matter. So, lolz, I won’t be asking anybody for anything any time soon.
Two more things and I’ll happily concede the sub-thread to you, since I think this topic is relatively boring and killing interest in this great thread since it’s not NESCAC specific. One, you keep trying to refer to the off-cycle admits like they’re barely removed statistically from the fall cohort, but you have no idea if that’s true. You’re just putting it out there like it’s a fact, when in fact you have no idea because many of the schools don’t report the information. This sub-topic is not about Hamilton and Colby. Second, I’m less concerned about admit %, because I’m not sure what it would even mean in this context. % of what? It’s not like there is a denominator of kids who are specifically applying for winter/spring term. What would be helpful would be to know the other stats: 25th/50th/75th percentile GPA/test score and % of kids in the respective tiers of the class for those whose high schools rank. If you knew those things, then you’d really know how the cohort compares, and it is without question relevant.
And actually one more thing, since it has come up in other threads: this discussion, for my part anyway, is not at all about how well the off-cycle cohort performs, how well they integrate into the student body, how happy they are, how quickly they make friends, etc. etc. etc. I’m not concerned about those things. If you get the offer to attend in Jan, you take it or leave it and however it works out is largely going to be a function of the kid rather than when they started. None of mine would have had any trouble at all with it.
It’s just a matter of missing admission data. That’s it. Nothing more.
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And for me, that data is missing because no one requires it, or asks for it, or reports it. USNWR doesn’t report updated info but reports only fall admission data, and the Dept of Ed doesn’t for the CDS.
The schools could make this available on their own websites. Some do, some don’t. It is up to them.
Yes, I am abundantly aware. Reciting those facts, which have nothing to do with your views and can otherwise be stipulated, means and changes nothing. This a discussion about what some think should be the case. We’re not engaged in a math proof.
I’m still unclear about the connection between the CDS system and the federal government. You keep referring to it. Does the government dictate the content and form of the CDS? Do they pay for it? I was under a different impression but stand to be corrected.
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----- 
lAY OFf MidD, or THE kID gETs IT!!!
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We’re still in what I would consider to be the earlyish phase of spring–lots of new green and sometimes flowers on trees and bushes. But honestly we are probably past my absolute favorite period, when all that seems to first really explode into life in the course of a week or so.
That said, there are baby Peregrine falcons on the Cathedral of Learning’s live cam–what is more springy than that?
I also like tracking the seasons with the Fallingwater live cam, although they track behind where we live being sorta up in the mountains:
As I write, the adult falcon is feeding the babies some prey! Cool and gross.
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Wesleyan students have begun a protest encampment:
Any other NESCACs?
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“We will remain at the encampment until Wesleyan meets our demands of divestment, disclosure and academic boycott,” the students said.
Let’s see if they last any longer than the Dartmouth “until I get real hungry” hunger strike.
I’ve not heard of other NESCACs following suit … yet. Others will likely follow.
Edit: Tufts has had an encampment up for a bit. Not sure how long. Sounds like it’s resulted in some damage to campus.
We used to have a nest on top of one of the taller downtown Seattle office buildings. When I was a junior associate, I was on the top floor of another building, and the window in my office went up to the ceiling and then continued up for another couple of feet at a 45 degree angle (or so) inward and back towards the building. Anyway, the Peregrine used to go hunting around downtown and would land in various locations. One day I looked up and it was perched on the window where the glass began its 45 degree angle inward. It just sat there for the longest time.
I was surprised by how big they are. I had always thought of the falcons, and the Peregrine especially, to be on the smaller side. They’re actually quite large.
Also quite beautiful up close.
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And Middlebury (+UVM):
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