College financial planner advised do not apply ED. Thoughts?

Postmodern
Mon, 31 Oct 2016 21:29:19 +0000

@mathewjn , please forgive me for recycling an old post:

I often recommend a book called “The Early Admissions Game” for this question. Written by two Harvard profs and a Wesleyan AD, it is a detailed, statistical analysis of ED, it’s advantages and disadvantages. A summary from an article by Louis Menand in The New Yorker says:
The chief finding reached by the authors of “The Early Admissions Game” is that applying early significantly increases the chances of acceptance. Their conclusions are based on data from the admissions offices at fourteen élite colleges and on a survey of three thousand high-school seniors.The average student in their sample who applied Early Action increased his or her chances of admission by 18.9 percentage points; an Early Decision application increased the chances of the average applicant in the sample by 34.8 points. The authors calculate that the advantage is the equivalent of a hundred additional points on the combined S.A.T. scores. An Early Decision application doubled the average applicant’s chances at Brown and nearly tripled them at Princeton. An Early Action application nearly tripled the chances at Harvard. Half of all current Harvard students were early applicants; only ten per cent of the regular applicants to Harvard were accepted.

They do cover athletes and legacies in the book and still show a clear statistical advantage for the unhooked, although not equal to the overall difference between ED and RD. (Note the use of the term “average applicant”.)

Yes, the analysis was a few years ago and application numbers have increased, but to date no one who points out that fact has any data to show the percentages have changed.