“ To determine the top-performing schools at the lowest possible costs to undergraduates, WalletHub compared more than 800 higher-education institutions in the U.S. across 30 key measures. The data set is grouped into seven categories, such as Student Selectivity, Cost & Financing and Career Outcomes. The metrics range from student-faculty ratio to graduation rate to post-attendance median salary.
Recognizing the challenge of predicting future outcomes, WalletHub’s Best Colleges ranking also analyzes post-attendance metrics — the student-loan default rate and the share of former students outearning high school graduates, for instance — to show the value of the education students can expect to receive beyond their undergraduate studies.”
Wallethub is an interesting choice of websites to look at rankings, and their metric us very financially focused.
Irrespective of its overall merits, the WalletHub site was introduced in this topic for a specific purpose. Its “selectivity rank” column provides a convenient way to compare Wesleyan and Vassar by general selectivity in the context of hundreds of other colleges and universities, an aspect that pertains to the OP’s original question. While this information cannot be entirely precise, it nonetheless may be of interest.
“Located just across the road from Vassar’s imposing main gate, the unique building, designed by Frederick Fisher and Partners (FF&P), combines three distinct programs: the headquarters of the newly established Vassar Institute for Liberal Arts; a 50-room hotel; and a restaurant and bar.”
ED matters because of yield. This is why Wesleyan has a lower overall admit rate than Vassar, but a higher early decision admit rate. Wesleyan incentivizes students to apply early in order to improve their yield. Schools really do like to lock in a chunk of their class early so as to provide clarity for their budget. Once that is done, they become more selective. These schools also have pretty small Athlete cohorts. At Vassar it’s only 18% of students.
Some math to figure out the actual rates, assuming most athletes commit in the early window: According to the Common Data Set (https://offices.vassar.edu/institutional-research/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2023/04/Vassar-College-CDS_2023_24-1.pdf), 1000 applicants, 380 admitted, Vassar shows 18% of students are athletes (which is 400 students total or 100 per class). Let’s say 90 of the 380 admitted for ED are athletes. That means 290 Early Decision non-athletes are admitted for an effective rate of 29%. That’s still double the rate of Regular Decision, so there’s a huge advantage.
IDK… from our school that is definitely not the case. The stronger students take their shot at other schools but are happy to fall back to Vassar. Its just not plan A the majority of the time. For us, the same is usually true for most NESCACs, Emory, etc…
Great article. Some heavy hitters have placed their architectural finger prints on the Wes campus. I look forward to getting back to campus to see the several updates.
I would advise caution in assuming that you can divide total number of athletes by 4 to figure out how many are athletes as freshmen.
When my child was applying to schools back in the day, we went through the men’s teams and counted up the number of freshmen on each team - it was in almost every case substantially larger than the number of seniors. There is a great deal of attrition among athletes- once they are admitted, even if they relied upon athletic preference, they are not obligated to stay on the team, and in fact, many only last a year or two.
Thus, although the total number of athletes might be 18%, the number of first year student athletes is almost certainly substantially higher. And of course, percentage of athletes among men and women will vary, dependent on factors like the gender ratio (more skewed at Vassar) or the presence of a football team (huge numbers of men, Wesleyan has one, Vassar does not).
All of this means that the percentage of athletes among ED applicants (to both schools) is higher than one might think.
Great point. the only thing I would say in defense of those numbers is that I erred on the side of having the huge majority of athletes come through the early window. Anecdotally, athletes at my kid’s school are still going to wait until the regular window for admission to some of the elite schools.
