I think Ive mentioned this before. But athletes dominate the social scene at Amherst. My nephew graduated a few years ago and my niece goes there now.
The school is small and the athletes organize all the parties. Each team sport is the social chair for a different party. And if you’re not friends with an athlete, your social life is more limited. Sure, if you want to make a few friends outside of these gatherings, it’s possible but the school is so small it’s not that easy.
Of course if you want to just go and study and find a couple of friends who arent into that scene, it’s possible.
Mick Jagger’s son was in D19’s graduating class! He was at the graduation ceremony and I had no idea until after lol when a friend sent me an instagram pic someone had posted and asked DID YOU SEE HIM
But also, D19 had no idea who he was haha (she knew him, but not well, and didn’t put 2+2 together). I asked her and she said “…oh… that Jagger” !
I have said a couple of times in CC that ED acceptance rate for LAC can be misleading due to recruited athletes, URM, Questbridge, demographic, and other institutional considerations. My D22 had applied ED to Williams not knowing any of these but just looking at a much higher ED acceptance rate. She was deferred and rejected from Williams, however, she was accepted to Amherst in RD. We would never know if she would’ve received an acceptance from Amherst if she did ED.
So, I played around with the data once to try to get a sense of the impact of athletes on ED. This NOT a rigorous analysis, but just seeing what the numbers might show. You can change the numbers around as well.
Amherst class of 2028 had 735 students apply ED. They accepted 216, which is a rate of 29.4%.
They currently field a total of 598 athletes across the four years. So, if you do a simple divide by 4, you get 150 athletes needed. Now, IF you assume that all 150 are recruited then you’d have:
I was there at the Miracle on 5th Street “dance” in the spring of 1996. It was a deeply weird event. Satellite trucks and TV lighting everywhere on the mall, tons of journalists asking people what they thought, etc. Mostly a giant PR stunt, as student groups had long since stopped caring about whether they could have a “dance” event on campus - with no on-campus Greek housing, virtually all parties were off-campus anyway.
Yeah Jeff Sellingo’s college admission book said the same thing. We know a few people who had kids get recruited and the academic bar for recruited athletes was very different than regular admission. They were part of ED and I would not look at ED as a true indicator for a normal student. Except for University of Chicago which loves ED.
This is not my area of expertise, but my understanding is at the highly selective/rejective colleges, that coaches may get a certain number of full support (i.e. get this kid in, please), and maybe a couple soft support (i.e., if you’re debating between this kid and another kid, please send this kid through), and that the rest are walk-ons. It also depends, however, on the college, because at some schools (I’ve heard MIT is one), a coach’s support doesn’t pull that much weight with admissions, whereas at others (perhaps where intercollegiate sports have greater importance), a coach is likelier to have more pull. But I’m going to page @Mwfan1921 who can probably provide better information.
ETA: @ECCA and anyone else interested, this post shares some data about athlete percentages at some schools and the source to get the info:
Can confirm from 35 and 25 ish years ago experiences -
Even in the big revenue sports (Football and Basketball) not all athletes are ‘scholarship’ in Division 1 (and fewer are also NIL-paid today). There are NCAA limits on the number of scholarships available by sport, and in the non-revenue sports, these are often fractional to 1/3 or 1/2s etc.
Then it gets even more complicated. There are Admissions offers to some (More for the larger / revenue generators), then there are the we will help you recruits (use a spot), then there are the 'preferred walk-on: you will be on the team, if you can get into the school on your own, then there are the walk-ons who may or may not receive an invite to come to the first few days (as tryouts), and then there is everybody else “we don’t see a spot for you here”.
LOL, D26 got the Pitt acceptance video this afternoon. It’s a “custom” video with her name, city, etc. in it. Pretty neat, but she could barely watch it! Too embarrassing to have a video with your name in it, apparently!
Omg my son, too! I loved it! Pitt really knows how to draw you in. The blue and gold day this summer was by far the best of any of the schools we visited. Can’t wait to see what the admitted students day is like tomorrow!
This is what I’m trying to get at! The claim I keep hearing that is stated as fact, but I suspect is speculation, supposition or hyperbole that inspired my post. I keep hearing something along the lines of “x school is 1/2 athletes, so after you factor in all those athletes, ED doesn’t provide any admissions benefit.” I particularly see this assertion with respect to SLACs because they are so small that the athletes overwhelm the process unlike at Big U. But the statement seems to assume that ALL of the athletes get some sort of admissions bump. Which I just don’t know if that is true. I know that there are recruited athletes with a bump, but I don’t know how many. I can’t fathom it is all or near all at many of these schools. So, I wonder where those who assert this get their data. How do they know what percentage of the athletes at Amherst or Williams or whatever other sporty schools were admitted more easily and how many are kids that got in the regular way and happen to play the sport.
For full transparency, I was a D1 athlete at an Ivy back in the day. I was not a recruited athlete there. And as you said, back then, coaches had x number of spots (and some support candidates as you say too) and everyone else had to get in on their own. ED wasn’t a thing there then, but I wonder if someone looked at the data of athlete ratio at the school, would I be counted in the number of athletes who took up a spot with our easier admissions for their conclusions about acceptance rates? I was far from the only one on my team who I know was not recruited. But I have no idea how it works now.
I’m trying to get at, is it true that as vast a proportion of spots are taken up by athletic recruits as people assert based on looking at how many athletes a small school has.
Similarly, my unhooked D20 was deferred from Middlebury ED1, but accepted RD to Midd and Williams. She was denied RD from Wesleyan. Her college counselor said that she probably would’ve been accepted ED2, but she wanted to wait for RD to see if she would get in to Midd.
I don’t know if you have errors in your analysis, but your things to note cover what I am actually wondering about. My assumption has always been that there is likely a significant chunk of athletes that are not recruited, meaning they get in just like everyone else. And most of the assertions about athlete impact on ED rates seem to assume that they are all recruited athletes. I don’t know how anyone knows what percentage actually are at a particular school based on the publicly available data. For D1, scholarship slots per sport could seem get you part way there, but not really as some teams split up scholarships between athletes and even that doesn’t directly correlate to how many athletes admissions helps get in.
