@My5Kiddos Having studied ND’s data in great detail over these past 2 years, I’ve actually found that Don Bishop’s comments from as far back as 2012 carry validity even today. Yes, the overall stats have continued to go up and the acceptance rates have gone down, but I’ve found that running the math on ND’s admissions is a lot easier than it is for some other schools.
For example, another school I’m looking at is Emory. Their admissions staff uses a lot of stats between Oxford College, Emory College, and overlapping applications to both schools such that it’s pretty difficult to determine the true admissions rate. Another school I’m looking at is Vanderbilt, and Vandy is verrry careful about when it provides absolute numbers and when it provides percentiles. With Vandy, my impression is that they do a good job of not being too explicit about the stark differences in their ED vs. RD pools.
Notre Dame is among the most straightforward of the schools on admissions math, and the math tends to hold fairly true over numerous years as ND does not seem to be one of those schools that has artificially drummed up the application numbers so that it can report an impressively low acceptance rate.