Colleges where ED admission rates are LOWER than RD

Applying to College
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I ran across something interesting when looking at some common data sets - there are actually some colleges where applying early decision has a lower admission rate than applying regular.

Loyola Maryland, for example reported in their latest CDS that they accepted 42% of students through ED, but 76% in regular decision.

Another one I found interesting was Franklin & Marshall, which has a close to identical acceptance rate between early and regular - 28%.

I realize that there are probably quite a few reasons for this (international students seeking aid, maybe students that are below the 25% for GPA/tests that are shooting their shot, etc.), but it’s interesting to see it play out in the stats like this. I’m kind of wondering if schools like these use ED purely for athletic recruiting and maybe they’re otherwise deferring students to regular rounds, but then I think we’d see fewer denials in the ED data.

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I don’t know the answer to your question but also ran across a couple of schools like this in our search: Willamette (77% ED, 81% overall) and Wooster (56% ED, 57% overall).

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The University of Denver most recently reported an ED acceptance rate of 238/310 (76.7%), implying a non-ED acceptance rate of 14281/18475 (77.3%), so basically the same.

One observation is in cases like this, DU simply is not getting that many ED applicants relative to non-ED applicants.

And then I think all this just underscores that generally schools are not going to admit applicants ED if they wouldn’t also want to enroll them RD. Like apparently about 23% of the ED applicants to DU in that cycle were not what they were looking for, so they didn’t admit them, confident they could enroll enough of the applicants they wanted out of RD as long as they admitted enough people (and offered enough merit, which DU does).

So I have never really believed in an “ED boost” per se. And I think these cases are illustrating that.

What I do believe sometimes happens is colleges may not admit otherwise well-qualified RD applicants they are convinced have almost no chance of actually enrolling, based on whatever yield model they are using. This could be waitlisting, or actual rejection.

Since this is not an issue for ED applicants, it is possible that sometimes an individual who would be rejected/waitlisted if they applied RD might get admitted if they applied ED.

But that is not a case of them admitting someone in ED they would not want if they applied RD. The premise is they would want the applicant either way, they just don’t think they could actually get that applicant to enroll if they applied non-binding.

OK, so if you are plausibly the type of person who will very likely get other competitive offers, and normally your type of person would choose one of those other offers, but in your particular case you actually would choose your potential ED school over those other offers, then applying ED might be a good idea in the sense it will communicate effectively that you really do want to choose that particular school over any other offers you could get.

If instead you are looking at a college where you individually are not very likely to get highly competitive offers (relative to that college), and in fact are really not highly competitive for that college by their normal standards, but you are hoping an “ED boost” will make them want you more than they normally would–I am skeptical that is likely to work.

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Yep, I think this is exactly right. Seems like there’s very little lowering of standards going on - if you’re not competitive, then showing a ton of demonstrated interest, as seen through applying ED, isn’t going to help.

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Yikes! D26 is seriously considering ED-ing to F & M. Didn’t realize that there’s no advantage in ED there. Would love to know why that is for this particular school.

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One shouldn’t count on ED getting them in vs. getting in on their accomplishments.

So if that’s the school for you, I wouldn’t worry.

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I think some schools (especially very competitive ones) use ED for yield protection. An acceptance equals an attendance, or close to 100% yield. For schools that aren’t as concerned with yield, my guess is they use ED to take those that are really exceptional for the school and defer most into the regular pool to be considered together as a group; these schools are looking holistically at their class.

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In a quick look I did not see F&M posting separate ED and RD acceptance rates. If F&M is the top choice and is affordable, ED could be a good option.

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This is the “level of applicant’s interest” or “yield protection” phenomenon with ED, particularly with “overqualified” applicants who (if not applying ED) would likely have other attractive admission and/or scholarship offers on the table.

Otherwise, ED (or EA or early rolling) may give an advantage if an early applicant fits a given desired profile and is admitted, but a later applicant with a similar profile is rejected or waitlisted because the school has already filled its need for that profile (e.g. capacity-limited major, player of a particular instrument in the marching band, etc.).

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Yes, sometimes people call this sort of thing “buckets”, and with a small enough bucket it might well “fill up” in ED. Indeed, often in a way this is transparently happening in athletic recruiting–the coach wants to recruit athletes for certain purposes/roles, and when such an athlete successfully applies ED, that bucket is filled. But plausibly in some cases there is no such transparency but something similar happens anyway.

Of course this is complicated because a given individual might fit into multiple buckets, and the college might be fine with one of those buckets already having been “filled” if admitting you would also help fill one or more other buckets. But in some cases it could plausibly make a difference.

To connect this back to DU, I noted it just doesn’t get all that many ED applicants to begin with. So plausibly even when DU accepts 77% of those folks, maybe not many buckets have been filled. So this effect may not happen much with them.

In terms of practical advice, I think most candidates don’t really have to worry much about this because their plausible “buckets” are not particularly small ones. But perhaps if there is something about you which could be a small bucket sort of thing, you might consider that when deciding whether to ED. Or perhaps where to ED, if you can identify some relevant match between you and some specific college (although absent someone like a coach or similar school official actually telling you that, you might be mistaken).

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I believe USC EA acceptance rate (~7%) is lower than USC RD (~9%). Of course there’s a very high number of EA applicants since it’s for scholarship purposes. We will see how these numbers change as USC decides to go forward with ED on Marshall/Leventhal applications.

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This is not unusual in the EA round. With EA there is no commitment on the part of the accepted student to attend. In the EA round many colleges only accept students who clearly meet/exceed their standards, defer others to review in the context of the entire applicant pool in the RD round, and reject some who are not fits.

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F&M has posted their updated common data set for 2024-2025. In it, they have the following:

total applicants: 9881
total accepted: 2785
acceptance rate: 28.19%

For early decision, they have the following:

ED applicants: 961
ED admits: 270
ED acceptance rate: 28.10%

You can subtract out the ED applicants to get an RD rate, if you’d like (although this doesn’t really matter since these rates are already very close):

RD applicants: 8915
RD admits: 2511
RD acceptance rate: 28.17%

So, the RD acceptance rate is a very tiny bit higher than the ED rate.

Thus, the question about what’s really happening here.

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