are colleges with high ED acceptance rate good academically?
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Anonymous
| Colleges like Harvard, MIT, Yale, etc have more or less the same ED vs. overall acceptance rates, mostly below 9%. But colleges like Amherst, Emory, Northeastern have a 30% acceptance but claim below 9% overall acceptance. Are these colleges artificially manufacturing these low overall acceptance rate but quietly admitting full tuition kids irrespective of their academic merits? In general, if a college has a huge imbalance in ED vs. overall acceptance rates, can they be trusted to offer rigorous academic programs and attract academically committed students? |
Anonymous
| Cue the Tulane 68% ED rate discussion 😊 |
Anonymous
|
Middlebury's ED acceptance rate is 39%.
Wesleyan's ED acceptance rate is 41% Barnard's ED acceptance rate is 25% WashU's ED acceptance rate is 26% BU's ED acceptance rate is 27% BC's ED acceptance rate is 30% Williams' ED acceptance rate is 27% The list goes on and on and on. |
Anonymous
|
What you should be looking at is the percentage of the freshmen class that is taken early decision. This is what really skews the overall acceptance rates. That will show if the EA or RD rounds are all for show:
Percent of class taken EDI and/or EDII: Barnard: 60% taken ED Colby: 50% taken ED Middlebury: 70% taken ED Vanderbilt: 50% taken ED Dartmouth:50% taken ED Williams:46% taken ED Brown: 50% taken ED Duke: 46% taken ED Wesleyan: 59% Wash. U: 74% BU: 57% Emory: 68% Johns Hopkins: 62% Rice: 44% BC: 58% Pomona: 52% Last year, NEU only took 34% ED |
Anonymous
|
MIT does not have ED.
My DS really liked CMU and applied ED to it for CS. ED was just to improve his chance. Then we realized that CMU costs 90K a year and I prayed hard that he would not get in there. He didn't. Thank God. |
Anonymous
Yes. These schools have way more qualified applicants than slots. Whether they are admitting a disproportionate amount of those qualified applicants in ED has no relationship to how rigorous they are. In fact, considering that ED students make up nearly half of all students in the incoming class at some of these schools, they would pull down the CDS stats if they were less qualified. There’s a lot wrong with ED, but there’s nothing to support the idea that popular schools are using it to sneak in unqualified students. |
Anonymous
| Do colleges provide data on GPA, SAT scores, etc., for their admitted class, with a breakdown of Early Decision (ED) vs. Regular Decision acceptances? |
Anonymous
| I think you’ve mistakenly included Amherst here. Amherst has been up front in saying that there is no advantage to applying ED and any perceived advantage is due to the recruited athletes that are accepted early. |
Anonymous
| When you remove recruited athletes and QuestBridge/Posse Scholars, the ED advantage is much diminished. |
Anonymous
| The ED acceptance rate isn’t an exact indicator of quality. It’s just a way of ensuring a critical mass of their students really want to be there instead of somewhere else. |
Anonymous
|
Revenue visibility tool for schools with endowments that are not massive.
Makes life easier for admissions offices Allows them to guarantee the mix of tuba players from Montana and kids from Serbia and URMs. Does nothing to help most kids of most parents on DCUM. But it’s the main tool in the game now. ED sucks. |
Anonymous
| High ED acceptance rate has low to zero correlation with quality. |
Anonymous
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It’s so funny that people correlate high rejection rates with quality.
High rejection rates come from branding, positioning, and marketing. How can you not see that!? |
Anonymous
Yes. There was a whole thread on here recently asking how Purdue could be well-regarded despite having an acceptance rate over 50%. Well, maybe because it’s an engineering school that puts a lot of weight on test scores? Low-scoring kids don’t apply. |
Anonymous
This is the answer. Ignore the rest. |