“Look, no one has a better shot with ED or other Early apps,:”
I think they definitely do, the Harvard data is pretty convincing on the advantage of SCEA. It’s not going to make an uncompetitive applicant get in, but if you’re a hyps caliber applicant, you should seriously consider scea at harvard, the other three you can’t definitively tell because their data is not public like Havard’s is. You do yourself a disservice if you don’t pay attention to the analysis coming out of the Harvard case.
The bottom line for me is that for the “average excellent unhooked kid”, ED is more in line with RD acceptance rates for most top colleges.
For Duke, the ED acceptance is 21%, the RD is 6%, I know that you have athletes, urms, legacies etc but 21 to 6 is not a rounding error. And as collegemom9 says, you’re competing in RD with the kids that got deferred by the ivies and similar colleges, in ED, it’s just the Duke applicants. If you’re an electrical engineering major and Duke is one of your top choices, do you apply ED or RD vs the kids that just missed the cut and got deferred by Stanford or MIT? Hint: go with Duke ED.