Early Action vs. Regular Admission

RockySoil
Thu, 16 May 2019 16:04:23 +0000

@Mwfan1921 Not trying to turn this into another CC debate on the benefits of ED/EA, but I think EA/ED/RD is a big source of misleading advice on this site, so here goes…

I think your Middlebury ED analysis is excellent, at least as far as any of us from the outside can tell. But the RD round also has a significant number of URM’s, first gens, sparse country applicants, some legacies, some athletes, etc. So the real RD number for unhooked kids is probably closer to 9 or 10% when compared apples-to-apples to the 23%. That is a really significant difference in admit rates, and if anything it understates the difference:

We only have good data on one school, because of the ongoing lawsuit. At Harvard, which only offers EA, has an 83% yield and publicly stated for years that there was no advantage to applying early, the data showed a 4x bump in admit rates (2% RD, 8%EA) for unhooked kids even after accounting for scores, grades, hooked status, and even EC/essay/recommendations (the regressions accounted for the numerical reader ratings the Ad Coms gave to each application after first reading). The correlation was so strong, there is little doubt that Harvard has been favoring early applicants for years. And if Harvard is doing it…

For most of these schools, I would guess that being above the 50% in scores is not good enough to waste the ED/EA bullet. At least above the 75% percentile, maybe the 90%, or being really unique in some way that is attractive to the school is probably the bar here.