Agreed. The “submitted”/”not submitted” ratios are clearly confounding factors.
It’s a dynamic situation. Among those mentioned, only Wesleyan can claim to have expanded the most over the past half-century (largely due to co-education in the early 1970s) and clearly has room for word-of-mouth to catch up with its reputation; it’s already experienced more than one admissions cycle where they’ve over-accepted the targeted first-year class size by nearly a hundred seats. My hunch is it’s anyone’s guess as to which cohort group future applicants should be paying more attention: the ivy overlaps or the matriculated class?
One thing everyone seems to agree on is that a half-century of holistic admissions has served Wesleyan well and I would even go so far as to say that it is better suited to weathering any pressure from the federal government to change its policies than some of its R1 university competitors.