Yes. If Vassar had 363 ED and let’s assume 350 enrolled. And 681 total enrolled so another 331 from rd and the ED admit rate is far higher than the overall rate - then RD yield isn’t overly high and multiples of rd are offered to fill a spot vs ED admits which are 98% likely to enroll.
ED is likely by far the best way in but ED does include athletes and other hooked folks. And likely many wealthy.
Just to complete this math, assuming a 98% ED yield rate, I get the following for the colleges in question (2022-23 CDS):
Bates: 314 ED admits, 308 ED enrollees, 713 RD admits, 210 RD enrollees (29.5% estimated RD yield)
Wesleyan: 424 ED admits, 416 ED enrollees, 1672 RD admits, 327 RD enrollees (19.6% estimated RD yield)
Vassar: 363 ED admits, 356 ED enrollees, 1766 RD admits, 325 RD enrollees (18.4% estimated RD yield)
I admit I am never quite sure why prospective applicants sometimes focus on the enrollee numbers. From my perspective, the good thing is if you get an offer of admission, because that gives you the option. But if you get an offer of admission from College A, then also from College B, and then you choose College B, that is not a worse outcome than enrolling at College A, it is presumably an even better outcome (by your criteria).
OK, so a lot of people at these colleges get admitted RD but then choose another college instead. But the second part of that doesn’t undermine the first.
And so to the extent you see these colleges not enrolling as many people RD as they admit, that is not something to be particularly concerned about. It just means they have a lot of tough competitors admitting some of the same applicants, which of course we already knew.
I think you have a typo in your Bates info. Should it be 713 RD admits instead of ED admits?
FWIW, my D applied to all three of these schools RD and was admitted to Vassar, waitlisted at Bates, and denied at Wes. She was admitted to three other SLACs (two NESCACS among them) that were more or equally as selective to these three schools. Holistic admissions at highly-rejective schools are almost impossible to predict.
What constitutes a “competitive range” for a college? Some multiple of its on-paper acceptance rate?
Asking because this was an argument my husband and I were having before bed last night. He thinks that with 20 slots in the common app, it makes more sense for our son to throw his hat in the ring at top tier schools. I argue that I’d rather see him apply to more schools where he has a 40%-50% chance of getting in (as opposed to a 10-20% chance). He is a more intuitive statistician than I am but I don’t see the sense in, say, encouraging DS to apply to Princeton (even given his legacy status). He thinks I’m too much of a pessimist.
Yes! Thank you and corrected.
I don’t think there is harm in one or two “hail mary” applications as long as there are enough sure bets/highly probable colleges which your kid is excited about and which are affordable.
Encouraging a reach-heavy list if your kid is lukewarm on the sure-bets often leads to having a kid trudge off in August as if he’d been sentenced to four years in a penal colony. So to me it’s not about statistics- it’s about psychology. Who wants to be driving the 8 year Civic with a dent in the side after they’ve done a test drive of a shiny new Tesla?
So you know your kid’s psychology better than we do. Is he genuinely excited about his safeties and are they affordable without donating a kidney?
My nephew reached too high and he really wasn’t excited for college (his one acceptance). He even got waitlisted at one of his safeties (he only had 2). He could’ve afforded any school.
I’m a believer in using all 20 spots.
But - the single most important school is the one you know you’re going to get into, is affordable and the student would love to attend.
That’s it. Just need that one. For some it’s the regional college or flagship. They apply nowhere else.
Two is better - so there’s choice or in case you misread.
After that the list is really by choice.
You want schools that your kid will have a good chance.
But if he applied to 18 with a 10% chance, got rejected to all 18, if he had the 1-2 he’s still be good. Maybe dejected but the student would have the right school.
I encouraged my kids to reach and they both got rejected and I’m glad so they’ll never wonder did they apply high enough.
Of course both chose safeties over matches and reaches so it had zero impact where they attended.
The goal is to find the right school. Admit rate doesn’t necessarily make one right or not right.
My kids got into low acceptance rate schools but both choose 80% schools, etc. they were right for them.
This is 100% my concern – that Rhodes (the first college we looked at, which he liked) will look a lot less exciting after a bunch of Carleton/Bowdoin/Vassar visits, and that he if blows his ED shots on those schools and then doesn’t get into Kenyon, Denison, or Occidental, he’ll have significant regrets.
I also know with a white-hot certainty that Princeton isn’t going to happen for him, and I’d rather not have him load up on gratuitous rejection. Life’s tricky enough…
Ideally you (or a counselor) would have access to GPA/test data for a decent number of prior applicants from your secondary school to that college. That could help you assess whether or not you are in their normal competitive range. The counselor might be able to actually give you an even better assessment that takes into account more factors, including relative rigor.
Absent that, you can just look for their test score and GPA ranges for enrolled students in their CDS submissions. Assuming they provide it, usually I would say if you are above their 50th percentiles you are definitely competitive, and if test optional I would say you could probably go down to 25ths for tests. GPAs are more complicated so you have to realistically self-assess rigor.
This is an eternal debate, but the experienced college counselors at our feederish HS generally suggest 2-3 particularly well-chosen reaches are enough, and past something like 5-6 you are starting to run a real risk of not submitting your best possible applications to any.
Mathematically, part of what is going on here is these are not independent probabilities. So, if similar Reach A does not admit you, your conditional probability of being admitted to similar Reach B should go down. If similar Reach B also does not admit you, then your conditional probability of being admitted to similar Reach C should go down even further. Depending on your model, your conditional probability can get astronomically low very fast.
And another related part is doing the work to understand what are in fact your best shots as reaches. If you really investigate what they are looking for beyond just numbers, and you determine you are in fact what they are looking for, great. If not so much, not so great. So, once you have carefully chosen the ones where you seem most like what they are looking for, the conditional probability all of those will reject you but another school where you are a worse fit will accept you is getting even lower.
As a final thought, the cases where it might be more like 5-6 than 2-3 typically involve either some fundamental indecision about type of school, or maybe a special circumstance with unknown resolution.
So, for example, some kids are applying to both LACs and mid-size private universities, or some are applying to both mid-size private universities and large public universities. 2-3 reaches of each type could get you into that 5-6 range.
Or, maybe you had a significantly worse grade period related to some personal crisis, and you are looking for your reaches to overlook that period for that reason. You might have 2-3 reaches defined on the assumption they will overlook that, and 2-3 different reaches defined on the assumption that they will not.
OK, so our HS also suggests 2 likelies, and 2-3 targets, for most kids. That is like 6-8 total, but again maybe it ends up more like 5-6 for reaches and even targets, which gets you to like 12-14 total. But that is really getting to the outer boundaries now of what they consider advisable, and even then you should have a good reason for why so many.
Still, in the end, none of this is dogmatic. But I think there are good reasons to believe that actually being really thoughtful about your best shots, and then really focusing on writing your best applications, is a better idea than just filling out as many applications as the Common App will allow.
And among them are that if you really have done a good job picking out 2-3, or at most 5-6 reaches, which are your best shots, you can trust it is unlikely adding more will really make a difference in the end.
Indeed, ideally you start realizing some targets or even likelies would be better outcomes anyway than like your 19th-favorite reach. Because that sort of thinking tends to be based on the implicit assumption that more selective = better for you, and that is generally not a good assumption.
yeah, this is a concern for me. I’m hoping to attenuate that possibility through strategic use of EA. If he likes Macalester as much as I think he will, and gets in EA, we’re done (or he can take more risks with ED II/RA slots.)
@goldbug - might he look at Union? They have EA and my daughter got a lot of merit aid there - we were impressed.
Yep, Union is on the list and we’re going to visit it in April.
So I personally simply do not believe ED helps as much for most applicants as some people seem to think. There are specific cases where it might indeed help a lot, but outside of those cases I think it often helps very little, or not at all.
So if the planets align for an ED (or ED II) college, great. But really, the main way to make sure of an outcome the kid will be excited about is to do the work to come up with a really well-chosen list of colleges.
And recently it has been becoming clear to me a common mistake is of the form I now think of as 19 super-reaches and 1 safety. This again usually happens because in some way the kid–or perhaps the parents, or both–has internalized the equation more selective = better. So, they just shotgun some list of extremely selective colleges on the assumption those must be the best colleges for them. And then that often doesn’t work, and they end up at the safety, and they feel like they lost.
Again, our HS very much encourages thinking about all this very differently. We start from the bottom up, and we don’t really do safeties, we do likelies. Likelies are supposed to be colleges you have identified as being great options for you, AND they are also very likely to admit you. It may seem like just a difference in name, but done right it is not, it involves a lot of care in thinking about what you really want in a college, what you and your family can afford, and so on. And sometimes the answer to at least one of your likelies is obvious, like an in-state option for which you are very well-qualified. But sometimes one, or indeed both, are less obvious, and indeed very personal.
And having two is not a trivial suggestion. Everyone likes choice, so if you end up choosing between two likelies, I think that feels a lot different from being forced by lack of other offers to go to just the one safety.
The other big difference is then to be super into finding great targets. Frankly, from a certain perspective, reaches can be kinda boring. Oh, I like this kind of school, I am thinking about these academic interests, maybe I would prefer to be in a certain area, and so on. And these are the best 2-3 colleges like that where I am competitive and it would be affordable. OK, fine, but that was not necessarily a super-interesting exercise.
Targets are way more fun because you are going to be compromising in some way from your theoretical ideal, but that in turn means you start really thinking about what matters to you most, and the schools that are special in those ways. And this gets very personal. For some it will be schools in DC that are great for international relations or politics. For others it will be LACs with a great arts scene. For others it will be colleges where a lot of people are super into academicky things, including possibly academic careers. For others it will be colleges close to a sunny beach, or great ski slopes. For others it will be a real shot at Big Merit. And on and on.
OK, so if you have done this right, your 2-3 (or up to 5-6) targets are all really special and exciting to you for one or more reasons you really care about. And if you have properly identified them as targets, there is a really good chance you will have a choice among several targets and likelies that are all special to you in some important way.
And then if you get into a reach (and you still prefer it), great. But no big deal if you have not.
And to finally come back around to ED, absolutely none of this depends on some specific ED strategy. Again, if it works out for you, great. But if ED doesn’t even make sense for you, or it doesn’t work out, who cares, because if you did this right you will end up with a great outcome anyway.
My nephew ED’d to northeastern and was denied, he refused to ED2 anywhere. When denials started to trickle in, he refused to apply to more schools (so his dad did it for him, he got denied too). He’s such a great kid, biggest nerd I know, it was so hard to see him crushed. I think his dad was just out of touch with how competitive it is (his alma mater has a 15% acceptance rate), and how much gpa matters compared to test scores (I don’t know his gpa, test scores were 1%). Personally I’m glad my kids are done with the process.
Fair warning, my S24 ended up surprising me, and himself, with a lot of his reactions to colleges when visiting. Some looked great on paper and were total nopes. Some looked marginal on paper and were big hits. Things got less volatile as the process went on, because we were learning from his prior reactions. But even once he started applications, S24’s thinking has still been evolving, and it may continue into the next phases as well.
None of which is to discourage having an early school which is realistic and a top favorite. That is great if it happens. If it is solid enough, maybe ED. But it might not be a college even on your list at this point, or it might not be any college at all.
This happened to me too. My first choice school on paper (which I applied to EA) ended up not being where I landed.
To add to Nice’s fine post- I remember being shocked when one of my kids dumped Northwestern from the list at the last minute.
We all remembered an incredible visit- one of those (rare) early Spring Chicago days with bright sunshine (it was cold but not unpleasant to walk around), the campus looked clean and shiny and well loved, the kids were all animated and seemed so happy to be there (and outside) and even random encounters- a senior in line at lunch-- were so peppy and positive and interesting. And the academics- you could NEVER run out of interesting things to study and learn and of course, we all wanted to join 50 clubs on the spot.
And then-- kid just decided “nope, not feeling it” and the love we’d all had for Northwestern came to a grinding halt.
So my takeaway- you just can’t orchestrate every element of the “list”. Except for an affordable safety where the kid can find something to love. That you can insist on!
Actually, my hope is that these visits will catalyze more enthusiasm/ownership by my son. Right now he’s having trouble visualizing what these places might actually be like. He enjoyed visiting Rhodes more than he thought it would, and it gave him a glimmer. Spring break trip might be edited dramatically after we get feedback from the range of schools we see in February. (e.g. maybe he decides he doesn’t want to go to such a small/rural school and we pivot to focus on Fordham/BC/Rochester/American/Santa Clara/Lehigh).
Don’t forget that some people are optimizers- they need to evaluate a wide range of options before narrowing it down to their final choice- and some people are just happy with “this is fine, meets many of my needs”. I learned with one of mine- you can’t force a kid who is happy with “this will work” to evaluate 30 schools and take ownership of the process of whittling it down.
And that’s ok! I was worried about “the road not taken” or the FOMO, when the kid was pretty happy with a very small application list and wasn’t terribly invested in “But hey, we haven’t looked in Montana yet, maybe there’s the perfect school for you in Montana”.
Maybe your kid IS showing ownership. Rhodes is fine-- which is great! And maybe he’ll think the next five schools he sees are fine- which is also great. Some kids really and truly don’t need the quest…and they still have a wonderful time in college…