“Take” is ambiguous in this context.
Again, they admitted many more people non-ED than ED.
But because ED yield is much higher than non-ED yield, they enrolled more students through the ED path than the non-ED path.
I am seeing 61% ED. Maybe that is bad internet info. Where are you seeing something different?
I personally think the US News Rankings are often less central to these strategies than some outsiders claim. Sure, we know of cases where an institution was gaming the rankings, so that happens. But I think a lot of these things are more fundamental than just that.
Like, I certainly think these institutions want to enroll more of certain sorts of applicants. This serves a variety of institutional stakeholders. Faculty like to teach certain students, and possibly use them in research positions. Non-academic Deans and such like certain students to be filling out various non-academic activities. To be very blunt, the budget office might have some thoughts. The development office might have some thoughts. And so on.
Rankings and such are part of prospective student marketing, and so the marketing folks might also have some thoughts. But I don’t think it is ALL prospective student marketing, indeed in some sense that is necessarily derivative. Because the point of prospective student marketing is itself to help the institution get more of the students it wants. So the primary reasons WHY it wants those students are coming from elsewhere.
Of course not everything an institution might do to get more of the students it wants is a good thing for kids. I don’t like these institutions trying to put pressure on anxious kids anymore than anyone else.
But I do think it helps to understand their motives are typically not so simple as only trying to manipulate some publication. They are in fact typically trying to actually enroll the students they really want to enroll.
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This seems to be a common misconception.
Their 2024-25 CDS is quite clear. They admitted 3951 total. They admitted 1217 ED. 1217/3951 is 30.8%.
What is happening is pretty obvious. If you did a reasonable estimate of ED enrolled (versus ED admits) and divided it by the number who enrolled, not who were admitted, it would be over 60% for that cycle.
But people on the Internet basically get sloppy about this. They treat admits and enrollees as if they were the same thing, and so just report ED enrollees as a percentage of all enrollees as if that was the same as ED admits as a percentage of all admits.
But they are very much not the same. Enrollees are almost the same as admits when it comes to ED. But non-ED admits is a much bigger number than non-ED enrollees for institutions like WashU. And so it is a mistake to confuse them.
I note I think this is something of a “click bait” issue. No one is going to care if you say WashU enrolled 31% through ED. But over 60%? Now you might get some attention.
Indeed, it fuels this idea that colleges like WashU are “filling up” with ED admits, leaving very little room to admit anyone RD. Again, that’s not getting the math of actual admits right, but expressing that idea is much more likely to get you some attention.
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This! Though I detest a lot of what Tulane does in admissions, it is not as impossible to get in RD as the internet makes it sound for the reasons you explain. We know several kids who got in RD as part of that bigger percentage of RD admits than people realize. One of them in fact is going to Tulane in the end.
Didn’t your son apply ED to Penn Wharton?
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And if you want to be cynical about things, THIS is a big marketing victory for colleges. ED is extremely one-sided in their favor. If they admit you, you are bound. But they don’t have to reject you. Instead, they can also defer you to RD, or waitlist you, or defer you then waitlist you, and so on.
So they are not actually bound to give you an early decision! They can if they feel like it, but they can also decide to delay their decision to later if they feel like it.
So how are these colleges getting so many highly qualified applicants to apply ED? Well, not all do, of course. If you look at colleges like, say, the University of Rochester or University of Denver, they are not getting enough ED applicants to “fill up” their classes even given this misleading math.
But it is obviously working for certain colleges, like people are sufficiently afraid of not getting in RD that they are willing to make this one-sided deal. And I think this whole atmosphere of them filling up with ED is helping them pull that off.
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The Wash U website states the 60% ED figure.
- Early Decision I and Early Decision II are the best rounds if you have done your research, know that WashU is the best fit, and are ready to make a commitment. If you are admitted to the university in either Early Decision round, you have made a commitment to attend the university and are expected to enroll at WashU. FYI – about 60% of our class is admitted through an ED round. The application deadline for Early Decision I is November 2, and the deadline for Early Decision II is January 4.
yes, and had a bunch of EA’s too.
IMO what WashU will do is defer strong applicants who their models show may have applied ED1 elsewhere.
They do NOT want to admit a kid in EA who gets admitted to their ED school (and this is why many schools have pushed EA decision dates well into January, even February.)
Then, they will contact deferred EA students and ask if they want to change to ED2, from the RD round, where the deferred EA student’s app is now.
Chicago, Tulane, Northeastern, CWRU, Villanova, Richmond all have been known to do this. Tulane used to (not sure current practices) admit deferred EA students who switch to ED2 within a few days of doing that, before the ED2 decision date.
This is the sloppy writing/reporting that niceunparticularman was referencing. WashU should state they enroll ~60% of their class through an ED round, not admit ~60% of the class through an ED round.
WashU had a total of 3,951 admits per the 24/25 CDS, with 1217 of those admitted in ED (30.8%) and 2734 in RD (69.2%).
Proportion of enrolled students from ED = 65.8% (1217 of 1847 total matriculants) and RD 34.2% (630/1847), that’s assuming 100% yield in ED which is high. If you assume 95% ED yield, proportion of enrolled students from ED falls to ~62.5%.
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Right, but that is a very carefully constructed sentence.
It is true over 60% of their enrolled classes recently were admitted through ED.
It is not true over 60% of their admits were admitted through ED.
And again, I understand that this way of framing things may help colleges like WashU market their ED. I’d like to believe they are not intentionally trying to mislead people, but that is an obvious risk given what then happens in online conversations.
So it should be correctly stated, Wash U enrolls 60%+ of their class from ED. Strange they are misleading people themselves, but either way… that is a significant %. Might be the highest besides U Chicago.
Wish people could get away from the rankings. They are skewed by many things and really matter little in the big picture.
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I guess I don’t understand what you’re arguing against. According to their website, UPenn enrolls more than half their class through ED. What’s good for the goose isn’t good for the gander?
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Not sure how to answer that because I am not arguing I do not think. Penn and Wash U are hardly the same though.
Penn is not a test optional school and they also does not yield poorly in regular decision. Penn does not have a simple application either. Penn is not trying to pump up their admit rate so you think they are a better school. They are truly a better school. When a student is given choice in RD, they still select Penn about half the time. I think it would be nice if they enrolled fewer people from ED, but that is not part of the discussion.
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In other words, to those students, desirable colleges are all reaches.
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for sure.. I have had AOs say in small groups the same- not all kids ARE admissible when applying so mathematically this is so. A top 20 AO was on a small group call with my kids school recently and said 40-60% of applicants are admissible (depends on department at this school and varies year to year) – so of kids that ARE competitive, that means the rate is a fair bit higher than published obviously. Its math. One of my kids went to a school with LOTS of truly competitive applicants (w/o any athletes) so you can see it in Naviance clearly..the school acceptance rate is way higher than published rates (even if only count most recent years - and yes, the school keeps up the data).
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That is often human nature…people often want what they can’t have… (or aspire to have)…exclusivity is basis of a LOT of goods.
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It is certainly up there. Just doing some raw math using their 2024-2025 CDS and looking at colleges I know were high by this measure before, I get:
Emory 67.7%
Lehigh 66.4%
WashU 65.9%
Tulane 62.9%
BU 59.2%
Northwestern 56.3%
Columbia 53.6%
There are also lots of high LACs, like:
Davidson 69.2%
Middlebury 68.4%
CMC 67.1%
Grinnell (has a special ED scholarship) 64.6%
Barnard 60.4%
Of course some colleges like Chicago don’t report this data, and I am probably missing some others in these ranges.
But just with these examples, it is an interesting group. You need to have enough people applying ED in the first place. Like the University of Denver only got 310 ED applications, with 1337 slots to fill, so couldn’t have done 50%+ with ED admits even if wanted to (and it didn’t want to, it only admitted 238).
But in addition to very high ED application counts, you also need not super high RD yield. So I think all of these colleges are in one way or another considered very desirable, but they are also facing some very stiff competition from other desirable colleges for their RD admits.
As a final thought, a popular ED program could be parasitic on RD yields, meaning if enough of the people who really like your college do in fact apply ED, that could actually help cause lower RD yields. This could be contributing in some of these cases to the extent they are “fit” schools, where the applicants who like them might really like them, enough to more frequently apply ED.
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And in fact as this community has discussed periodically before, one of the things the more “feederish” high schools are often doing is at least strongly guiding their students toward their better Reach and Target prospects, and away from their worse Reach and Target prospects.
So that logically contributes to that sort of effect–much higher acceptance rates than their general rates.
But probably also increases yield as well, meaning when those colleges admit students from those schools, they probably have reason to believe they might well have a better chance of yielding them.
Which means less danger of yield protection (waitlistings and rejections of RD applicants the college would want but think won’t take their offer), and even higher admit rates . . . .
Again a cynical person would suggest this is all making these high schools look better, and to be sure they are often not shy about publishing their college matriculation data.
But less cynically, this sort of “brokering” function could be helping colleges and students find each other more efficiently, with less waste of applications or overlooking of promising options.
And to bring it all together, I think these counselors are also not shy about promoting ED when they think that makes sense.
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