Your observation matches mine. I teach in a magnet program housed in a title I high school in Texas.
I think it is much easier now than 5 years ago for high school graduates to attend 2-year college locally. Easier in both academic requirements and financial ability. I just took a group of juniors to visit a local community college. The message from the CC was clear - apply and weâll admit you. They provide free tutoring in fundamental reading, writing, and math. I saw one piece of scratch paper left on a desk, on it was the steps solving a quadratic equation. The CC tour guide spent more than half an hour describing the non-academic resources the school would provide to the students - food, clothing, rides, car towing, etc. One of my students summed it up: as long as I submit application then graduate from high school, Iâll be admitted here. I take free bus to school, or say my car broke down and someone will give me a ride. as long as I show up, I can get free food and free clothes, make an appointment for a tutor to get my assignments done, and I get a degree.
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For sure, but I think the basic barrier to applying EDâyou are boundâis always going to be a problem for some colleges.
Like the University of Denver, say, has around 1500 enrollment slots (give or take) it is trying to fill.
The total number of ED applications it received as reported in recent CDSes are (accepted in parens):
2020-21 402 (172)
2021-22 359 (135)
2022-23 224 (139)
2023-24 183 (151)
Interestingly, at DU this has been trending DOWN recently. DU apparently still doesnât want to admit every ED applicant, but even if it did, it still couldnât come close to filling up the whole target enrolled class that way.
So what it does instead is offer merit. DU reported about a $75M institutional merit aid budget for 2023-24, which is quite large. 179 of students with need also got merit, and then another 796 without need got merit, a total of 975, which was about 68% of the entire class.
Even so, their overall yield was only 1458/13679, 10.7%. And while I am sure DU would love to increase that among the students they actually want, ED does not seem like a promising tool for them to do much more of that. Because the students they actually want are apparently too often unwilling to ED there.
I am pointing this out because I think when some people talk about colleges filling up with ED admits, they are thinking of really only a limited subset of schools with ED. They simply are not looking at colleges like Denver.
But maybe they should be? Of course in the end, you might prefer another offerâlike nearly 90% of DU admits. But I donât think you need to worry much about DU rejecting you just because you didnât apply ED.
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I donât mean to nitpick but you read the wrong line for Villanova. There were 820 ED admits (1657 is the number that applied). So using the ratio you are usingâŠthere were 6 non ED admits for each ED admit, which I think you would say makes your point more strongly that our HS is an anomaly. But honestly you can use stats to make lots of points. I tend to look more at the percent of applicants that are admitted.
If you look at it as percentage of applicants that are admitted, our HS stats are fairly close to Villanova norm, at least for ED.:
8/12 (67%) of our HS applicants who applied ED were admitted (overall ED admit rate for Villanova during this time was >55%)
4/29 (14%) of our HS applicants were admitted EA/RD (overall EA/RD admit rate for Villanova during this time was about 25%)
I do know that different schools have different results. For example, we havenât gotten anyone in to Vanderbilt in at least 7 years. The school down the road from us gets 3-5 in per year.
The point I originally made - which I think is very true - is that whether ED helps or not varies a lot by school. At some schools it helps a lot and at other schools it helps less or not much at all. And I guess you could amend that by clarifying that the âit dependsâ answer applies to both the college and the HS in question.
You absolutely should nitpick something like this! Correction accepted.
So before we do this, I think it is important to note that of course the ED and non-ED pools are not necessarily representative of each other, indeed we know various ways they typically are not. So it is very important to understand that the same individual moving from one pool to the other may not experience any sort of individual change in odds. Instead, the observed difference in rates could be entirely a matter of just the relative mix of applicants. And even if not, the individuals that do experience any sort of difference may only be some subset of the overall pool.
If you look at it as percentage of applicants that are admitted, our HS stats are fairly close to Villanova norm, at least for ED.:
8/12 (67%) of our HS applicants who applied ED were admitted (overall ED admit rate for Villanova during this time was >55%)
4/29 (14%) of our HS applicants were admitted EA/RD (overall EA/RD admit rate for Villanova during this time was about 25%)
So obviously the non-ED admit rate is quite a bit lower than average for Villanova. If both the ED and non-ED admit rates had been low, this might make some sense. But since your ED admit rate is actually higher, not lower, this is definitely still a major anomaly.
But this is sorta illustrating the point I was trying to make before. I think in cases like this, there is less of an ED advantage, and more of an RD disadvantage. And maybe the RD disadvantage at your HS, when applying to Villanova, is unusually high. I can certainly imagine lots of reasons that might be true. So while this data does not quite prove that, it is at least what I would call a plausible hypothesis.
So I am not trying to suggest if someone at your HS really wants to go to Villanova, they should not be concerned about a possible RD disadvantage. I just think framing it that way helps avoid the unfortunate tendency for people to think there is some sort of generic boost that everyone who applies ED is going to get.
In the overall scheme of things, approximately what % of colleges offer
ED?
Most of the second tier colleges. Because they want to improve yield. Ha!
Not really joking
But only privates, right? So back to my question, overall, how much does that comprise?
A good number of colleges in the graphic in the article are publics.
Yea, we are just going to disagree on this, at least to a degree. There is a big admission advantage to apply to Villanova EDâŠas told to me directly by an AO. In addition, when looking at the most recent data (I havenât seen CDS for 2024-2025, but as reported at admitted students day) the most recent acceptance rate was 60% for ED and 23 for RD (for Villanova l as a whole). Very similar to our schoolâs rate this year 2/3 ED accepted and 2/10 EA/RD accepted.
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This is purportedly a âcompleteâ list:
Assuming I counted right (big assumption), it appears to be just shy of 200.
I believe there are somewhere around 1700 private non-profit four-year colleges in the US. So this is obviously only a small fraction of that total (it would be much smaller still if we included publics). But of course for reasons we have been discussing here, in certain circles it can seem like this is all or almost all of the privates their kids would actually consider.
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200 is a LOT more than I would have thought. Thanks
There are a few public schools that also have ED - like The College of New Jersey and the University of Virginia (although I believe UVA will stop offering ED in the future).
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I see some on the list. Did not realize that.
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Not in Florida number of applications continue to go up along with stats of students and percentage of acceptance continues to Drop with UF and FSU in the 20 something Percentile
But are the other Florida public universities becoming easier to get admitted to?
The trend seems to be that the more selective private schools and the popular state flagships are getting more competitive to get admitted to, but other state universities and less selective privates may be getting easier to get admitted to.
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Yeah, the bottom line is there are only going to be so many unique applicants in a given application cycle. And the US supply of applicants has leveled off. So you really canât have the system as a whole getting more competitive for admissions, and if some colleges are getting more competitive, it likely means others are getting less.
I do think Internationals are a bit of a complicating factors, but that is . . . complicated. It is increasingly obvious to me that most of the International pool is needy, perhaps very high need. And there are only so many need-based offers available for them in the whole US, and none at all at many colleges. So those colleges are getting lots and lots of International applicantsâbut rejecting so many of them they end up only making up a modest portion of the actual admit and enrolled pools.
Then reasonably qualified full pay Internationals will find many more US colleges open to them, but so many in fact relative to the number of such Internationals they are not really crowding out domestic applicants.
So I do think Internationals are playing an increasingly big role in driving down the total admit rates at various prominent colleges. But I donât think they are really doing much, if anything, yet to make college admissions more challenging for domestic applicants.
FYI the original arrival is from the Hechinger Report. It can be accessed here:
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Pretty much all Publics in Florida are getting harder to get into as Students that get denied at UF and FSU that would of been accepted just a few years ago are now at UCF or USF and this is trickling down throughout the University system. There is a couple schools UNF, and UWF, University of North Florida and West Florida, and also FGCU which are still easier to get into but their stats needed for admission are climbing.
Florida has a couple letâs call them niche Public universities a HBCU, FAMU, and a LAC ,New College, which donât seem to have the same pressure on rising applicants. However, FAMU is number 1 rated Public HBCU
New College is having some issues right now but thatâs another story
Florida does have a program called the talent twenty where if you are in the top 20% of graduating class and applied to 3 Florida Publics and were denied you will be offered a spot at a Florida Public but NOT of your choosing, the school picks. There are a few other requirements as well for this.
Florida Pre Paid which allows new parents in Florida to lock in tuition prices at birth and pay it over time plus bright futures scholarships that can pay 75 or 100% of tuition and these programs are stackable, Basically your tuition is paid and you get an equivalent check every semester ( there are some fees not covered)
Daughter at UF is tuition free plus getting paid basically equivalent amount every semester
I believe Pre Paid and Bright Futures are two driving factors keeping top students in state
and making it more competitive
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