<p>Cue7,</p>
<p>NU President said he’d like to have expand ED so more students on campus have NU as their first choice, which would create a more vibrant campus and better sense of community. He never mentioned anything about using it to get higher yield or lower rate. Obviously, just because he never mentioned it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t the case. But if NU had no ED and by using the RD yield, the admission rate would have been 19.5%. The real rate would be lower than that since the RD yield is assumed for even the ones that applied ED. Let’s just use 17%, which I think is fair as it’s kinda near the middle but closer to 19.5%, then we are talking about only 3 percentage-point difference between using ED+RD and using RD only. That doesn’t seem all that effective as a tool and therefore I doubt that’s really the primary motivation behind ED. </p>
<p>Many people seem to have this misconception that ED would make a huge impact on yield. I guess it’s not intuitive but they will find the opposite if they actually sit down and do the math. Then there are many people who do not recognize that EA may have higher impact to the yield than ED. While EA doesn’t give 100% yield, the yield is still definitely higher than RD and it’s the best of both world and attracts a lot more applicants than ED.</p>