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Replies to: EA Ivy vs ED other top 20 colleges
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. It is what it is...
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.
You're right that RD will pull in applicanats who didn't get into an Early cycle elsewhere. Plus kids also applying RD to S or MIT and using, say, Duke as a back-up. But for Early, you still need to be compelling, among the top kids applying, as the college sees it. Not just what you want.
The focus on admit stats on many threads takes away from this awareness.
Can't comment as much on Ivies since our Ivy spots are always early apps - athletes or legacies. No exceptions this year.
The trick to ED1 and ED2 is the ability to rank the schools you are interested in and live with the notion of "lost opportunities" or "what might have been".
Funny enough this conversation came up last night at dinner.
We have 2 children who have gone through the application process. I have toured Bowdoin 5 times. Maine has been a vacation spot for us for years, so we literally jump-started our eldest search early with a tour after Sophomore year....just to see what a college campus was like. Loved it (the kids liked it OK too). Junior year tour, interview visit....no application (ED I at another school).
Our second child was down to Bowdoin and 2 other schools for ED I. Too hard to differentiate after Junior year visits, so we embarked on a 3 overnight tour (5 days) at the 3 schools. Bowdoin visit was great (including time with a high-school friend who was a freshman)....but eventually, the application was for a better fit elsewhere.
Fast forward to dinner last night...."do you ever wonder how things would be if I went to Bowdoin"?
No...was the answer. I never think about it, because it's not a decision that was ours to make. EDI at Bowdoin could have been a rejection, at which point EDII at another school might not have been successful.
You have to make your decisions before the applications and accept the results from your strategy. That includes athletes, who litter these forums with their rejections after an "early read" or positive vibes from a coach. ED is asking someone to marry you. Thinking about who you might have married had you been single after that is pointless (unless you decide to get divorced and start over again....an option).
This is not necessarily true. If the school looks affordable per the NPC (with all the typical npc caveats) and it's the students #1 choice, and there is a bump for ED vs RD....I would encourage that student to apply, regardless of their SES standing.
I also think it's VERY hard to commit to a financial commitment without knowing options. If you are running the NPC, then in the back of your head there have to be questions about ROI and options. Am I better off at school A for $20k or a free ride at school C? If you know you're paying retail for college and that your child is likely to gain admission to a place without merit money...it's dramatically different.
ED without financial concern is much easier.
What I find most problematical are parents/kids who are working the problem backwards. That is they have a list of 15 +- highly selective schools and are trying to game which is the most highly ranked (by prestige, not their own fit) school the ED (esp) or SCEA card will be the most advantageous for them based on published admit rates between ED, ED2, EA and RD rather than ranking the schools by personal fit and then determining if applying the ED/EA card for one of their top picks is worth it. The other rookie mistake is ascribing a greater value to ED than it is worth based on hope (like assuming 20 local EC's will make up for below average academics -- oftentimes the same people). The ED/EA boost is for the qualified candidate who is right on the fence -- the one who makes it to Committee in the first place imo.
A lot of kids pick say Stanford for computer science without visiting the campus or knowing it's a fit. Are you saying those kids are making a mistake by choosing Stanford for CS based on it's prestige? You'd be the first. And just to show I'm not totally stem-biased, people picking Yale for English because of its prestige are making the same mistake? Wow, a whole lot of kids making mistakes picking those colleges.
"The other rookie mistake is ascribing a greater value to ED than it is worth based on hope (like assuming 20 local EC's will make up for below average academics -- oftentimes the same people)."
Again this is a huge generalization without anything to back it up. Are you saying that people applying to Columbia or JHU ED have below average academics and 20 fluff ECs?
On the first point, sure there are kids who are picking Stanford and Yale without ever visiting their campuses or knowing for sure it is a fit and are not making a mistake, but there certainly are those who are blindly picking or ranking based purely on prestige. How many threads do we see on this site with kids wanting "chances" for every/most Ivies, MIT, Caltech, Duke, Chicago, etc... and 5 selective LACs. Many of those are making mistakes. For purposes of this thread, I am referring to the imo backwards process of blindly ranking schools on prestige and then trying to figure out which ones give you the best ED/EA bump relative to RD rather than ranking schools based on personal fit first and then seeing where ED/EA makes the most sense. Prestige certainly is a legitimate factor, but so are things such as size of student body as a whole, class sizes, departmental resources for undergrads, geography (weather, big city, suburb, rural...), social life and whether or not you are in fact competitive academically. The non hooked kid who chooses Stanford and uses his/her SCEA/ED bullet there when let's say his/her SAT score is 1450, is ranked not in the top 3-5%, but 6-15% of a non-feeder school and has no national recognition is making a mistake. Same for the kid who could have Stanford level stat's but whose personality is more suited to a small school environment, say Harvey Mudd and could have ED'd there.
On the second point, I have no clue how you could have interpreted what I wrote to how you translated it. I made no qualitative comment about any school. My simple point was people incorrectly assuming that they could elevate an otherwise noncompetitive application to a "yes" by using the ED magic bullet. It is akin to people assuming a bunch of not particularly unique EC's/recognition (president of 10 clubs, shadow a doctor, all district debater, etc...) will make up for subpar (for that school's) academics. My last sentence very clearly put the prior sentence in context, "The ED/EA boost is for the qualified candidate who is right on the fence -- the one who makes it to Committee in the first place imo." As to correlating overly optimistic people, of course no, I didn't do a statistical study over a valid sample size, but it is not a wild observation of human nature that people who fall short in an area many times look/hope for something else to make up for the shortfall. Maybe I shouldn't have used "oftentimes" so I will replace that with "sometimes".
Guidance tells students to search and if they have a #1, apply early. I have to wonder; if a couple of students are accepted early from your HS, are any candidates considered RD, especially those lower ranked?
The assumption is every kid going for ED knows the school well, deeply, and can ace this. But not necessarily. Sure, many can, but stats/ECs don't predict that.
The early applicant pool is certainly higher-quality on average, in the sense of being able to produce an attractive application. Early applicants are savvier about the process, wealthier and at higher-quality schools with better college counseling on average, enjoying many advantages. So you'd expect applicants in that pool to produce better-looking applications that check all the boxes (including making the case for why they match a particular school), and to be admitted at a higher rate.
Yield is also not insignificant to these schools. They have a certain number of beds and locking down a big chunk of the class early has value, too (some cynically say that locking down the required critical mass of full payers early matters too, even at the supposedly need-blind schools). It's a little different for the SCEA schools, because you aren't required to accept the offer, but if you used your bullet there and got in, you're very likely to enroll. It was your first choice in November, and will probably still be your first choice in March. You might say that HYPS don't have to care about yield, which is mostly true, but leads on to the final point.
These schools use SCEA and EA/ED as an important tool to shape the class. If they need exactly one elite bassoonist, and you're one and apply early, your odds are significantly enhanced, because you indicated that this school was your first choice and are very likely (if SCEA) or virtually certain (if ED) to enroll. By admitting you early, the school avoids a potential jump ball with peer schools for elite bassoonists in the RD round.
I don't buy it. I don't think that you're correctly interpreting the Harvard admissions data regarding SCEA. Do you have a link that shows definitively what you state, or is that just your interpretation?