<p>I think that’s true generally but not necessarily so clear with Chicago. Chicago gets a fair number of RD applications from people who thought they had a good chance for SCEA at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Stanford, but were disappointed. There are quite a lot of such people: about 17,000 last year. How many apply to Chicago? That’s anybody’s guess, but mine would be around 4,000 (or about 20% of the RD applications). That would be a big slug of people almost all of whom have off-the-chart stats.</p>
<p>By the way – most of the EA pool is neither accepted nor rejected EA, but deferred to RD. That means that the real RD acceptance rate is close to 5%, and that the real acceptance rate for EA applicants (taking into account RD) is probably in the vicinity of three times that.</p>