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EA schools should be applied EA, unless there are limitations like REA applications.
Rolling schools should be applied as early as possible.
The reason is that some of them fill up or fill up popular majors early. UMD is known for this.
RD can be worked on, but not submitted and paid until ED delivers a non-admission result, or the RD deadline comes before the ED result.
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This poster isn’t looking for merit aid…but for those who are…there are some colleges that DO have application deadlines well before the ED admissions are released.
So…for others reading. Check those deadlines and make your your RD applications are submitted by the deadline for merit aid consideration.
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I have a student who was set on applying ED to a reach. It was very reachy for him, but he really wanted to do it to increase his chances. Parents were concerned that IF he got in, it wouldn’t be a good fit ultimately. They said no and the student wasn’t happy about it.
He applied EA where he could and got into a school a couple of months ago that he is very happy about. Soon he will be getting decisions about his very reachy schools, which I think he has mostly disregarded at this point. Not least because he is considering a gap year.
My point is that a kid should always apply ED because they really love it and really want to go to that school. Not because they are hoping it will improve the odds. And you, as the parent, have a say in the decision. Yes, they can choose their college, but they don’t necessarily get to control all aspects of the process. We know our kids better than they know themselves sometimes. This student may yet get into his reach, but we all feel his EA choice is a great fit.
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OP, can I ask where you saw the “varying opinions” you mentioned? I’m mulling over the same things, but somehow came to the following:
- HYPSM don’t have ED and have minimal bump for REA/EA
- The remainder of Ivy+ and their tier have ED and there seems to be a small bump for that. This group may include the very top LACs
- The layer just below that seem to have strong interest in their ED applicants and give a decent boost and for a large percentage of their incoming class
- The subsequent tiers seem similar but the delta between ED and RD doesn’t feel too bad since the RD numbers get better
My recollection was that I heard the “there is no benefit to ED (or REA)” line from many info sessions of the tippy tops. Looking at the Naviance/Scoir results seemed to agree for HYPSM, but then the next tier revealed what seemed to me more of the ED bump. The schools that have ED2 seem to like ED applicants, but also will be kinder to ED2 applicants.
This is all from trying to glean trends from scattergrams, the noted ED reputation of schools, and anecdotal reports from various families, and is representative of just my cursory research.
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I’ll bite. We were very willing to be full pay…and our kid also knew she would need to choose a top choice eventually. But she wanted to be able to make that choice from amongst the acceptances to her schools. So that’s what she did. But she did apply rolling and EA to her top three choices. And she had acceptances by mid December at the latest.
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This is where we are leaning presently too. EA to safeties, matches, and favorites that have it, and RD to the remainder. If one loves every school on the list, one is done early and can relax while waiting for the later results. I just can’t tell how supported this approach is despite it feeling like a viable one.
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My kid only applied to two RD schools. A reach and a parent pick. Frankly, both of those were a waste of money and time. The first three schools were her top choices. And she graduated from one of them.
We probably would not have been enthusiastic supporters of ED…because kids do change between December and May when they have to make a matriculation choice.
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Here’s my two cents… I’ll try to keep it short - but this may be a bit nerdy/involved:
- ED should only be considered for a true first choice school. If there is a first choice school that is clear cut, and ED has a benefit, then ED could make sense.
- ED should be considered if you already have the makings of your best possible application. If you need your grades from 1st sem of senior year to be included, then you may consider ED not to be the best option. If you are working on something that will cause in inflection in your profile (in contention for a major award or academic or extracurricular milestone), then ED may not be the best choice.
- ED will not be an option unless you are well prepared - get letters of rec planned out and teachers lined up by the end of Junior year. Have those SATs/ACTs tied up by end of summer (last test for ED qualification will be Sept/Oct), etc. Also need to start essays earlier and have those mapped out.
- Do you have a chance to check the box on other key items that could benefit you? Does the school offer interviews (for many schools, you need to be already into the process of interviewing by the end of summer and should be working getting things set up mid-summer… if not earlier). Are you visiting the school? Are you doing other demonstrated interest things? Those may be more powerful than ED.
- Does your application have something interesting to it that a time-compressed admissions officer may not have the time to consider (a lower GPA due to a semester where there was a major issue on the personal front)? Admissions teams have more time to think about those things in the ED round, as opposed to the crush of the RD application tidal wave.
- The nerdy part… ED is not necessarily a benefit for many schools. My kids fell into the T50 range of liberal arts schools - higher were reach, mid were target, and closer to #50 were safety. I looked up the Common Data Set reports and saw the admit rate, the ED app and acceptance rate, etc. and also built in assumptions for how many ED applicants could be recruited athletes (usually something like 150-180 for these schools depending on how many m&w teams there were… I just went with 165 to keep the calc simple). The results should not be surprising: At the 50th slot or so, ED presented NO BENEFIT to gaining admission. Some schools just over 50th actually showed a negative result (lower acceptance than RD) likely because these schools were second choices, and their applicant pools improved with RD. ED acceptance rates started to exceed RD rates somewhere around T35-40 and became almost universally higher within the T20. In all cases, after accounting for recruited athletes, the amount of the bump varied by school (most extreme is probably Colorado College - if you don’t apply EDI or II you are extremely unlikely to get an offer - most available slots are filled with ED applicants), but generally got stronger the higher the ranking. If you find yourself in a similar place, then it’s worth it to do the math - you may find some surprises for your school.
After this, is it still worthwhile to do ED? Yes, if the above conditions are met. If you are already in the median 50th percentile in GPA and testing for a school, and it falls into the ED benefit group, then you should strongly consider it if you meet the other criteria above. Otherwise, just go with RD and try to get more options (but with less of a chance to get into that reach school for T10, most serious applicants are going ED… the RD round gets more competitive since there’s spillover from Ivy ED rejections, etc. - but it’s OK, BTW, as there are many, many other considerations… the school should be your clear #1 if you even want to consider ED).
Also know that the ED applicant pool for schools where the math looks like it matters will have very strong applicant pools for their ED group, so if you are a marginal candidate for the school, it may ultimately not help you.
Other fun things in the math exposed by CDS reports:
- Women generally have much higher acceptance rates than men for liberals arts colleges. Usually significantly higher. It’s such a trend that among the schools on my kids initial tracking lists (25 schools), only Vassar and Bowdoin had higher acceptance rates for men. At Vassar, its a real difference (25% for men, 15% +/- for women). For Bowdoin, the spread was only 2% or so.
- If you look at the non-need based aid numbers, you can see where schools are using merit aid to “purchase” higher ranked students (referred to sometimes an “buyer” schools). The trend here was generally the same as the ED benefit. At 50th for LACs, the merit aid is very high (often 50% of the cost of the year or more), while merit aid entirely disappears within the T20. This is among D3 schools. D1 schools (e.g., Colgate, Bucknell, etc.) offer more athletic scholarships and other benefits, so merit aid is not something they generally do. So if you’re applying to a D3 “buyer” school you may be able to get in if you’re on the lower end of their median GPA/SAT/ACT stats if you are OK paying more for the school.
Long post, but hopefully helpful.
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Our student’s leading choices were all “meets need” schools, no merit opportunities, and we knew we would not qualify for need-based aid. We were able to support the decision to ED to the absolute favorite on the list, and it worked out. It was a relief to be done before the holiday break.
I will reinforce points raised above. Make sure the student is exercising all EA options available on their list. Also, even if applying RD to a school, be sure to check if there are priority application deadlines for special program, scholarship, or honors college consideration. They should get those in, too.
If there are schools the student will apply to if deferred from their ED1 choice, they should identify what supplemental essays (if any) those schools will require. They should keep good notes on those schools so that supplemental essay writing will be somewhat less burdensome in the short window between the ED1 decision release date and RD application deadlines. They should also consider if they wish to peruse an ED2 option, depending.
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This is so true! I think most kids’ lists and preferences undergo many changes during their senior year. Both of my kids were initially happy to apply to some colleges that they totally lost interest in come decision time. We definitely wasted money on a few apps.
Anyone who has been on this board for a while has seen posts from students who regret applying ED. We have already seen some this cycle.
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The most plausible case for when a college might actually admit someone unhooked ED who they would not also admit RD is if they would not admit them RD because their RD yield model indicates too low a chance of them yielding.
And this makes sense only for certain colleges in certain markets where they might get a lot of applications from well-qualified people who have them buried deep on their personal depth chart.
That basic model explains most of the cases where there appears to possibly be better chances for highly qualified ED applicants, and the cases where that proposition appears less well founded.
Given this, if you actually really like one of those colleges but suspect their yield model would say you didn’t, you could see ED as a way of assuring them their yield model would be wrong as to you.
But then for many colleges with ED it will not matter because in fact just applying at all, or perhaps applying with normal demonstrated interest, is enough to put you high enough in their yield model. Or at least if they offer you merit or other incentives.
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THIS.
If you are applying to very selective schools just below the top tier, ED can be a very big bump. Many of My D’s top choices were in this tier and offer a huge ED bump and two rounds of ED. It’s true that some of the ED1 bump is from recruited athletes and legacies, but even taking that into account there seems to be a “second” tier of very selective schools where ED helps a lot.
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Agree with your assessment here. And I nerd out on the stats too, and found the same thing for the range of LACs my kid was interested in.
To add to the nerdiness: There are several colleges with even greater percentages of each class made up by ED admits than Colorado College. Here are the ones in which ED admits make up 60% or greater of the class (Colorado College class of 2026 had 57.3% admitted ED - similar rate to W&L, Wesleyan, Vanderbilt, Smith, Lehigh, JHU, Northwestern and more)
ED Admits as percentage of freshman class:
Bates 60.6%
Claremont McKenna 68%
Colgate 60%
Davidson 64.4%
Grinnell 66.8%
Emory 66%
Middlebury 68.7%
Pomona 67%
Tulane 68%
Wash U 60.4%
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I note that although ED admits made up a large percentage of enrollees at those colleges, they made up a far lower percentage of admittees, due to relatives low RD yields.
Bates, for example, per its 2023-24 CDS, admitted 338 ED, and 847 RD. Likely around 328 enrolled ED, and around 177 RD, implying an RD yield of just under 21%.
We’re about to see all this in action, incidentally. Certain applicants are going to get admitted to multiple colleges like this RD, in some cases also Ivies and other highly selective colleges, and of course they can pick only one. So they will only become an RD enrollee at one college, despite being an RD admit at many colleges.
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In this forum I recently saw a “debate” in the Draft Itinerary past and I think in my very long Environmental Science/Studies thread.
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I didn’t realize who opened the thread.
If I recall your list included Oregon and Mac??
So in your case I think it comes down to - after visiting and setting in on a #1, are you willing to pay that price if #2 offers merit (Mac) or #3 an even lesser expense (Oregon).
I don’t know your list - so those are hypothetical rank - but if you decide that - as an example -
I’d rather her be at Bates for $80K+ instead of Mac at $55K or Oregon at $64K minus merit (for OOS) - then you should ED.
If you’re unsure that you want to pay $80K+ - even for the clear #1 - and you’d like to pay less if possible - then you shouldn’t ED.
At least that’s how I read this…
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Agree with both you and Shawk. Also need to back out the recruited athletes to unpack those figures a little more. Approx 165 of the ED pool needs to be backed out of the calculations to find out the “true academic admit rate”. It brings things further in line with what the true admit rate is, and waters down some of the fear of not getting into ED round. Once you do that, there are still a few renown outliers (good call out on Wash U - it wasn’t a school on our list, but it is like Colorado College and an extreme example of primarily using the ED process to fill up the class). Middlebury, for example, based on 22-23 data is: 27% of all admissions are ED. Admit rate for all applicants: 13%. Admit rate for ED: 42%. Excluding about 165 recruited athletes ED admit rate: 31%. Residual admit rate for RD applicants: 10%. Based on this, you can see that due to likely a number of variables, a much higher % of applicants get admitted ED. Schools like Colorado College are even more extreme (I don’t have the math… but I recall that the admit rate for RD was something like 4-5% - and CC applicants don’t have the strength of a school like Midd… the CC admissions office just likes to structure things in a way that let’s them cherry pick only the tip-top of the applicant pool for RD). It’s worth it to pay attention to the details when researching schools or you could just be wasting your time if you don’t ED. Doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of great schools and for many students ED is not the answer - but for a select few schools, if you want a realistic chance of getting in you’ll need to ED.
Bottom line: What I’ve learned is that every schools has an angle that their Admissions Office likes to play to drive public-facing figures like: Testing scores for applicants (going test optional artificially inflates the “averages” since lower scores wont be reported); Acceptance rates (Colby specifically structures their application process to produce low numbers); yield (CC college’s super focus on ED).
Other angles:
- Scholarships that have a deadline before the RD application due date (W&L has one where you need to get your scholarship essay and RD application submitted by 12/1 - those not tracking will miss this, and it should be considered synonymous with demonstrated interest).
- Weighting interview highly (see the CDS - a few schools still do- e.g., Holy Cross), or needing to track the portals for the method to request the interview (Midd), or ending the interview window prior to the end of summer ahead of senior year (William & Mary) or artificially early mid first sem, and for all having limited interview slots that are only available on a first come-first served basis.
- Weighting demonstrated interest highly (see the CDS - Kenyon falls into this bucket). Need to do campus visits(!), track those emails (lots of little sneaky requests like submit your favorite book or song), request information, establish contact with AOs, attend AO visits to your HS, etc.
- Post-application submission “optional” requests for information (Denison sends all RD applicants a “Why Denison” prompt, Colby sends an “additional information” email near end of Feb… Colby also does not ask for a mid-year grade update, so this submission is really another application essay where the applicant should note grades as part of their overall “update”, Colgate supplemental essays due a month after the main application, etc.).
- Putting extra things in the application portal (lots of kids just don’t check them, and schools know this… my kids were awful… ) that are not called out in the Common App or the Admissions website (Hamilton video submission - one of my kids missed this one).
- Hiding little details in the application website on some of these items (both common app and the admissions websites for all schools your student is interested in need to be parsed though VERY CAREFULLY… and that parsing should happen by mid-junior year - and if your kid doesn’t have a list of colleges or they say “I dont know” remember that they’re just kids - they really don’t and you should be patient. It will likely be on you to help them curate that list of 20-30 schools for the initial broad net list and then you’ll need to parse though the requirements. Narrowing comes later, and kids seems to really start to wake up throughout the process.
Anyway… again, just passing along…
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I agree to an extent, but the Colorado College CDS for 2023-24 shows just half of the current freshman class were ED admits (259 admitted ED out of 517 total class size) not as extreme in years past. I wonder how in addition to ED1 and ED2, having a non-binding EA option figures into their numbers, as those stats aren’t broken down anywhere. Still, the RD rate is well below 10% while the ED rate is around 35-38%, and it is one of the schools to seriously consider applying ED if it’s a student’s first choice, along with many others on the list I posted. Interestingly enough, Tufts is another one I’ve heard about in the same vein, but their data isn’t available from the source I used (and I haven’t mined their CDS).
Your analysis of all these nuances is really helpful to anyone considering ED, I’m sure it will help the OP!
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I note the other thing we would really need to control for is that the ED pool is a self-selecting pool, and unlike the RD pool you can only ED at one college.
So, in RD, you can get a lot of “shotgun” or other not particularly competitive applications, because that doesn’t really have a significant opportunity cost (and maybe not even a cash cost if you can get a waiver). But that’s likely to happen less in ED, both because people will likely be more strategic about ED, but also just because at most people have one ED per round, whereas they could have 20+ RD.
How much does this actually distort the numbers, then? I don’t think this is easy to know, and I do think it very much varies by college. Like, in cases where there is little observed difference between ED and RD admit rates, I think that is often obviously because the college in question just isn’t a popular choice among the shotgunners, prestige chasers, New England/California dreamers, and so on.
Conversely, in most cases where there is a more substantial difference, it is plausibly at least in part because one or more of those factors is driving up RD application volumes among relatively unqualified applicants.
So . . . if you are actually well qualified and have thoughtful reasons for applying, and all that comes out in your application, are you really getting information out of seeing a low RD rate when that is in part a function of the college getting a lot of shotgunners and such?
I personally don’t really think you can trust that sort of information to guide important decisions.
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