<p>If you need to be able to compare financial aid packages, then you have no choice but to apply EA, RD, and Rolling. ED is out.</p>
<p>ED is only (and I repeat ONLY) for those students who know to the penny what their financial limits are, and who are prepared to kiss an ED acceptance with an aid package that does not meet their limits good-bye. Even when students do receive what appears to be a good enough aid package at the time of ED acceptance, all to often when the final revised offer appears in April, they discover that the revised offer is significantly lower, and the much-loved ED institution is now unaffordable.</p>
<p>Ask your parents to sit down with you and run the Net Price Calculator at your dream institution, and the NPCs at two or three of the ones that they like. Verify that they are truly ready, willing, and able to pay what those NPCs indicate the various places are likely to cost you. Then, if your potential ED institution is within their affordable range, ask them if they will reconsider allowing you to apply ED provided that you have all of the other applications ready to go if the ED institution rejects you or if you are admitted but not offered sufficient aid.</p>
<p>And go find yourself at least one dead-on admissions and financial safety that you would be willing to attend if all else goes wrong in the process, and apply there so you do indeed have a back-up in the bag.</p>