Early action vs Early Decision

JHS
Tue, 20 Sep 2016 15:38:22 +0000

There aren’t any stats for Chicago’s early decision acceptance rate, because this is the very first year Chicago will be offering early decision. I’m sure everyone is curious to see what that rate is. And, by the same token, no one expects Chicago’s EA admission rate to be similar at all to the past this year, because of the ED option.

I don’t believe Chicago ever publicized its EA admission rate for the classes of 2019 or 2020; before that, it was around 12%, but had been dropping rapidly year to year. The number of EA applications had been increasing at a huge rate (which slowed somewhat the past couple of years), and at the same time the college was admitting a higher percentage of its total admits from the EA pool (over half, the past few years), but the increase in EA acceptances wasn’t keeping up at all with the increase in EA applications. The EA admission rate the past couple of years was probably in the 10-11% range.

It’s hard to believe Chicago will actually take a bigger percentage of its total class from the early application pool this year, since it is clearly well over 50%, and most other colleges seem to want to hold it down to 30-40%. The actual number of early admission acceptances will probably be comparable to the past few years, since Chicago’s yield on its EA pool included lots of kids for whom Chicago was a clear first choice, and who would have applied ED if that option had been available. The big questions are (a) how many people will apply ED, (b) how will the ED option affect the number of people who apply EA (will it be a 1-for-1 tradeoff, will total early applications keep increasing, or will people be less willing to apply EA because of the fear of being shunted aside for the ED people), and © how will the early admits be hacked up between ED and EA?

FWIW, here’s my guesses (which are just guesses, albeit informed by some years of following admission trends): About 2,500-3,000 ED applications. About 400 ED acceptances (13-16% acceptance rate). About 9,000 EA applications (i.e., slight decline overall in early applications, but I could be super-wrong about that), with about 900 early acceptances (10%).