<p>ohh im not hesitating 
i wish all my schools had EA…</p>
<p>and true, but your mind could change… i’d never do ED (at one point i wanted to, and now i dont even like that school anymore)</p>
<p>So, silly question about SCEA…it means you can’t apply anywhere else until after you hear back from your SCEA school, right? Even places with rolling admissions?</p>
<p>Laaaame. T.T</p>
<p>aeschylus-- i think at princeton you can apply to public schools EA only</p>
<p>:/ scea…</p>
<p>Just to clarify some misinformation in this thread - I guaranty you that the admit rate at Stanford, MIT, Caltech, and a bunch more is higher for the single choice early applicants than for regular decision; maybe not by much but it is higher. Not sure how anyone can look at those school’s stats and not see that there’s a slight edge if you tell the school they are your number one choice.</p>
<p>The actual impact of H & P’s decision remains to be seen…</p>
<p>I dislike SCEA because to me that defeats the point of applying early action. In my own opinion, the point of appyling early action is to have assurance that you will be going to college at a few schools, esp. safety schools. SCEA (although I will say that Stanford’s allows you to apply EA to state schools) limits your options and wastes your early action if you are deferred/rejected.</p>
<p>Just to clarify- there’s no SCEA at MIT</p>
<p>well but I think they’re going to have SCEA at H * P</p>
<p>I wonder if Yale will take a hit from this. I personally do not like SCEA. I applied EA to UChicago, MIT, and Georgetown. If SCEA chances are the same as regular chances, wouldn’t you want a little more predictability? (Yes, I realize that Georgetown and UChicago are marginally more predictable.) Also, people say they apply early to get more applications out of the way; I got three out of the way that I would have applied to anyway. So many people got discouraged when they were deferred from Yale. I was accepted to UChicago and that is setting a positive mood for the the rest of this year. I could not be happier with my decision not to apply SCEA.</p>
<p>(By the way, this reminds my of the Cambridge/Oxford rule that you can only apply to one)</p>
<p>With the SCEA schools, the “traditional” rule has been that you could apply to rolling admissions public universities (sometimes only in your state of residence – you have to read the actual policy), you could apply to “early” programs that did not promise a decision before January 15 (i.e., ED II), and you could apply to schools where specific scholarship opportunities required an early application (but it could not be a binding ED-type program unless the decision came after January 15). In general, that pretty much cuts out any college that is more than remotely academically competitive with HYPS, especially since Michigan dropped its rolling admissions in favor of EA. Of course, you can still submit RD applications anywhere early, but you can’t apply to an early admission program.</p>
<p>Harvard and Princeton’s SCEA will have a significant impact on Yale and Stanford admissions. I expect the number of early applications to each school to decrease greatly, even by a half, with all of them being single choice. </p>
<p>A lot of well-qualified students whose first choices were harvard and princeton have been applying to Yale and Stanford early. I wonder if Yale and Stanford would decrease the number of acceptances from SCEA because otherwise the acceptance rate would shoot up due to the smaller applicant pool…</p>
<p>^ no one is forcing anyone to apply SCEA to HYP. You can still apply EA to as many schools as you want and apply to HYP regular decision. This is a choice that will curb the VERY top students from hedging their bets by ed’ing lower ivies and also stop HYP caliber rd applicants from taking acceptances from lower ranked schools that they have no desire to actually go to. It will also stop the very obnoxious (sorry if I’m offending anyone but too many kids at my school do this) kid who gets accepted SCEA to Yale but turns it down for Harvard RD. Well, maybe not stop but definitely slow down.</p>
<p>I don’t think Yale and Stanford EA applications will go down much, if at all, because I think more people will think they have a meaningful shot at those schools with the Harvard/Princeton crowd gone. I do think they may take a few fewer people anticipating that their yield will go up.</p>
<p>What you can’t really tell from the outside is how much these schools game potential cross-admits. Thus, for example, did Yale accept desirable applicants in SCEA that it suspected might really prefer to go to Harvard or Princeton (i.e., because they were legacies at those schools) in order to try to woo them? Or did it defer such applicants because it suspected they wouldn’t enroll? Who knows?</p>
<p>I’m not fully understanding the point of SCEA…can someone explain?</p>
<p>Hunt: I honestly don’t think anyone games the SCEA process, except for maybe some (small) bias against legacies, who, provided they applied SCEA, are probably equally likely to come if admitted RD. People at Yale or Stanford certainly don’t sit around assuming that they will lose head-to-head competitions with Harvard. They know they will lose some, but they know they’ll win some, too. People at each place are sure that they offer the most attractive package of college qualities, and they are confident of their ability to communicate what’s great about their institution to applicants.</p>
<p>They also know that it’s awfully hard to predict what 17-year-olds will do, what they are thinking. The past few years, I don’t think they could possibly have any good way of knowing who was really waiting for Harvard or Princeton, who was persuadable, and who was going to withdraw all other applications if accepted at Yale. (I project: Anyone who only knew me a little would have thought I was certain to go to Harvard, but Harvard was always a distant second choice for me.) So I believe they pick whom they want to pick, and do their best to market to the ones they pick. Any other strategy would be totally sub-optimal.</p>
<p>I agree with frenchsilkpie</p>
<p>^ Good for you. You are perfectly free to pursue that sort of admissions strategy. Lots of people do.</p>
<p>Restricting EA to a single choice has a number of benefits to the college and to the student. To the college, above all, it restricts the number of early applications it receives by imposing what is perceived as a significant opportunity cost on the applicant. When Harvard first dropped ED in favor of EA, it originally had unrestricted EA, and it was immediately swamped (from its standpoint) with an unmanageable number of early applications. (In retrospect, it’s funny – the unmanageable number of early applications Harvard got in its one year of unrestricted EA was less than the number of SCEA applications Yale or Stanford got the past few years. But at the time, it was way out of proportion to total applications, especially compared to ED, which because of its much higher opportunity cost draws a much smaller number of applications.) You can still see that difference. The University of Chicago, which has unrestricted EA, overall gets about 60% of the applications that Yale or Stanford get, but it gets the same or higher number of early applications – about a third of total applications. If Harvard got the same proportion of its applications early, it would get twice as many early applications as anyone has ever gotten, and the period from November 1 to December 15 might not be long enough to process and to evaluate all of them.</p>
<p>Apart from the swamped-with-applications issue, I also think that the colleges don’t want to waste time evaluating strong candidates who have applied ED elsewhere and are likely to be admitted, and thus would not be able to accept admission if offered. The attitude is – and, realistically, probably should be – “if he’s good enough for Harvard, he’s probably going to get accepted at Brown or Cornell ED, so it’s a waste of our time to read that application, much less give it a coveted EA slot”.</p>
<p>Second, and more importantly, SCEA has a much more powerful signalling function for the student than unrestricted EA has. With SCEA – especially now that Harvard and Princeton will offer it, too – the student is really saying, “This college is my first choice. I am giving up the opportunity to apply early elsewhere to apply early here.” Students certainly think it’s valuable to communicate that. I’m not so convinced that any of HYPS cares whether it is a student’s first choice (as long as the student isn’t actually committed elsewhere), but it probably can’t hurt for them to know, and maybe they do care a little. With unrestricted EA, the college doesn’t know whether it’s the student’s first, second, or fifth choice. As a result, I think if you strip out the athletes and other recruits, there is little or no evidence that unrestricted EA most places offers students a meaningful advantage over RD, other than convenience and relief if one is accepted. ED (where there is a strong signalling function) clearly does offer a meaningful advantage. It’s not clear that there is any advantage with SCEA, but it looks like there probably is. (Not that weaker applicants are admitted SCEA, but that fewer really strong applicants are turned away.)</p>
<p>SCEA, like EA, also gives the college a long period to recruit the students it has accepted, but it also ensures that for practical purposes it will have exclusivity during that period. That’s a pretty good benefit, too.</p>
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<p>So…I could apply by USC’s “Scholarship Deadline” while also applying SCEA to Princeton? USC’s deadline is 12/1 and it’s non-binding but you do find out before RD (not sure exactly when).</p>