<p>I was in a similar position as you (OOS, ED’ed at Cornell, applied to UMich and Berkeley as well later, all for CS) last year.</p>
<p>I ended up getting deferred by Cornell’s CoE, and even though I really wanted to go there, it was pretty great that that had happened, since I ended up choosing to go to Berkeley. But I wouldn’t worry about the negligible difference in rankings… I ended up choosing based on location (bay area / SV > east coast, climate etc) and a few other factors. Don’t bother factoring in ranking at all for colleges that are all in this scenario.</p>
<p>A huge reason you may want to go ahead with EDing to Cornell is if you don’t want to have big classes. Cal, and I imagine UMich as well, have 500+ students in some courses (I have 800+ in one of my CS courses). You may think this isn’t a big deal now, but you might realize later that is. At Cal, it can also be difficult to get into several popular courses. Probably something similar at Mich as well. Although Cornell is a big school, you certainly won’t have this problem to the extent you will at Cal and UMich. Personally though, I would still just apply EA to Mich, and apply RD to the other two (this is what I should’ve done in hindsight instead of ED’ing to Cornell). Then IF you get into all 3, decide in March. The reason I say this is that I really wanted to go to Cornell back in October/November, but that changed later.</p>