<p>I’m a current college student (at Caltech) who’s trying to help a friend make a decision on whether to apply to Caltech two years early. I won’t get into the specifics of his situation - I don’t want people trying to determine whether he in particular should apply early. My question is this - if you apply to a college (in particular Caltech) a year or two early and are rejected, does this hurt your chances of admission when you reapply a year or two later? I.e. if you developed and improved your application from year to year the same amount regardless of whether you had applied to college early this year, would applying and failing to gain admission this year hurt the strength of your application next year? I imagine that part of the answer rests on how much your application improves between application attempts, and that they would be looking for definite improvement in order to change their decision. Does anybody have any thoughts?</p>
<p>I guess the most fundamental question counselors will ask is why he wants to get to college early. Has he taken advantage of all the resources around him (ie Community College classes, classes at a local state university)? Do his teachers believe him to be a mature student? I’m afraid I’m answering the question you didn’t want us to answer…</p>
<p>If the application has vastly improved, then there should be no noticeable difference. However, if the student sends in similar recommendations, similar grades, and no evidence of attempts to continue to challenge himself, then I’m afraid adcoms will be likely to throw the app away after a few minutes of review (given they’ve already looked at his previous one).</p>
<p>You had better contact the admisssion office re: repeated applications. I know that some schools will only consider an applicant twice- this is more to do with trying to transfer , but it would be worth asking if there is a limit to how many times one can apply</p>
<p>Thanks for the responses - the issues you’ve raised are I think the most important ones to think about when considering whether to apply early. It sounds like your decision to apply early should be based on whether you think you’d be ready to go to college if you got in this year, not because you could apply again next year if it doesn’t work out this year - is this the correct mindset to have when making the decision, more or less?</p>