But it wouldn’t be the difference between $6940 and $6100 . Based on this years applicant pool, about 304 fewer students got in than would have if the percentage been the same, or about 0.84% out of the entire applicant pool. That would only be about $51 of $6100 , not $840.
Thank you, mom2and, for bringing in some good ol’ correct math.
Brown University accepted 2,580 of 30,397 applicants, or an 8.49% acceptance rate. Last year, the university had a 8.6% acceptance rate.
Dartmouth College accepted 2,120 students from 20,504 applications, for an admissions rate of 10.3%, according to a college spokesperson. Dartmouth received 19,235 applications last year.
The University of Pennsylvania accepted 3,697 from 37,267 applicants — the largest in the University’s history — according to a university press release. The admissions rate for the Class of 2019 stayed the same as last year, at 9.9%.
Yale University’s admissions rate rose, from 6.26% for the Class of 2018 to this year’s 6.49%. Yale admitted 1,963 of 30,237 applicants, according to a university press release.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/ivy-league-acceptance-class-of-2019-2015-3#ixzz3W08gDc00
i don’t have a problem with private colleges and ED. The most competitive don’t practice tuition discounting and only give finaid. If a family needs tuition discounting in the form of merit then the application list should be crafted with that in mind. And almost every private that doesn’t practice ED practices EA.
@ThereAreLlamas, there are problems with your reasoning.
One is that admissions chances to Ivies/equivalents are not uncorrelated, so someone with a 30% chance actually doesn’t have close to a 97% chance of getting in to one.
The other is that you added the penalty of the harder RD round but didn’t add the benefit of the easier ED round (granted, that would vary by school and the student profile, but for a 30% chance applicant, ED would then range from “good chance” to “barely” improved, depending on the school and her/his profile).
The ED system certainly does benefit some applicants and hurts others, but overall, its a wash because if a certain group of schools enrolls 20K students each year, they will eventually enroll 20K students each year regardless of the system that they use.
I don’t think you understood my example. If I were just saying that the acceptance probability wasn’t dependent on anything else, I wouldn’t have used 30%, would I? I would’ve used the 5-10% numbers that apply to the population as a whole.
In fact, my example errs (in favor of simplification) by assuming there’s more correlation than there actually is. In the real world, the characteristics that would make someone’s probability rise above the pool as a whole wouldn’t work exactly the same at every school. As a random example: having certain things in your application might raise you from 5% to 30% at MIT (say), but only from 5% to 10% at Harvard. I simplified things for the sake of the calculation, by just doing it across the board.
The point is that even a modest percentage chance at one school becomes a very high percentage when you apply it across ten.
The lack of correlation is kind of my point, in part. The kid who applies early to Harvard and gets turned down would’ve been accepted if he applied early to “University X,” but doesn’t because he’s now in the enormous pool vying for less than half of University X’s remaining spots. Meanwhile, a kid who looked worse to University X gets accepted early because he aimed lower with the early application. Throw into the mix that - let’s say - the second (highly cautious) kid really preferred University W to University X - and probably would’ve been accepted if he’d done his early application there - but he doesn’t wind up at his preferred college because he didn’t want to take the risk.
Obviously, it’s a wash in the end, in one sense. But it increases the random nature of the outcome. The 20,000 that get admitted won’t be the same 20,000 that would be admitted in the absence of EA/ED - and, even if they were, they wouldn’t wind up at the same colleges. If you replaced the current system with one that was entirely random (just have the colleges take turns drawing applicant names out of a hat) would also be a “wash” in the sense that the same number of students would be admitted.
@cptofthehouse A double legacy at my school with decent stats got rejected from Penn today…
As cptofthehouse pointed out, legacy doesn’t count in RD. Penn is very clear legacy is only considered in ED on their website, in their alumni magazine, and probably in any communication with the admissions office. Last year, they were pretty open that they accepted 46% of legacy applicants in the ED round.
The message is very clear, if you have a child interested in Penn, have the child apply early.
Yep, this is what I emphasized to my close friend’s daughter. Her brother already a student at Penn. Not only did she get in ED, but they received far more money than they expected. After she saw students rejected from the RD round, she celebrated again.
I think all of us on CC know how eD matters to UPenn.
So they are accepting more ED full pay kids and making the RD acceptance numbers ridiculously low. Sigh.
JYM, there is no evidence that the need based packages for kids being accepted ED are any lower than they would have been in RD. Need is need for the deep pocketed schools.
The issue is should a kid give up the opportunity to weigh a merit award RD vs. the ED need award. But I’ve seen no evidence that a school (we’ve been discussing Penn so let’s stick with Penn) is cheating the ED kids to whom it awards need based aid.
@jym626 , I never thought that ED candidates were only full pay families. I did think that their FA policies are somewhat transparent so many families can figure out a ballpark figure for their COA. Heck, I’m no accountant or anything, but even I was able to guesstimate a friend’s EFC for her, to within a few thousand dollars, so she knew that she could afford UPenn before her son applied, if he decided to do ED.
@ThereAreLlamas, what correlation are you assuming to get 97%?
In any case, I don’t think ED makes the process more random. What ED does is reward the conservative applicant who has done research over the reaching applicant who hasn’t, however. Say that you have 2 applicants who’s main strong point is very high stats. One of them researches which schools still give a big boost for that in ED and figures out what else he/she needs to do to make their application attractive for that school. The other one doesn’t and applies SCEA to HYPS. They would likely have different results while their results may be more similar in a world without the early round, but I wouldn’t say that the world with ED is more random or unfair.
While it is probably true that more ED’ers are full pay, this is where cc can change its tune and really help middle/low-income folks. The mantra on cc by 100:1 is that those that who need financial aid should not apply ED. Yet, the best need-based aid packages are offered by the most selective schools, where ED is a boost. So, while one can compare aid packages by not applying ED, at the same time RD lower one’s chance of the most generous aid package.
Best to run the aid calculators, IMO and decide if one can budget/live with the aid that a ED school may offer. (Works best for those on straight W2 income, and no family-owned businesses.)
Legacy doesn’t count anywhere RD when a school offers Early Apps. Think about it from the AdCom’s perspective: what you are signaling to them is that at best legacy school is only #2; in other words, you are foregoing ED bcos you like someplace better. Nothing wrong with that, but if you want the legacy love, ya gotta show the Adcoms the ED love.
As I said before, UPenn was very generous with my friend’s daughter, perhaps because they now have 2 children attending.
The problem is that it takes one wrong advice to undermine a dozen correct ones. The financial angle of the ED has often been misunderstood and misrepresented on CC. In the beginning, there were consistent reports that schools had no power to enforce the binding nature of the contracts. Then, after the Common App added the nebulous languages, it opened the door to the other swing of the pendulum: the belief that applicants could delay their decision through “negotiations” with the schools all the way to the RD days. The truth has always been simpler, but people want loopholes to exploit a lot more than the real … scoop.
In today’s early decision world, the rich have an upper hand. But they do in about every part of the process, and this from way before colleges are on everyone’s mind. That upper hand takes the form of access to better advice. On the other hand, that does NOT mean that the disadvantaged cannot benefit from the ED. Actually, programs such as Questbridge are delivering a substantial part of the early applicants (and admitted) at the CC darling schools. Fwiw, the greatest benefit of the program is none other than pushing for an early focus on preparing the best “package.” This requires efforts that start right BEFORE the summer, if not earlier.
As far as evaluating the EFC, anyone with a modicum of effort can evaluate the number to the … penny. The formula is shared online on an annual basis. With this, all that is needed is plug the numbers into an Excel sheet. Anyone could do this when kids are sophomores and … plan accordingly. Understanding how assets in the name of kids work and assets that are not counted is important but not part of secret conspiracy. Again, the educated wins!
What is NOT possible to evaluate is how schools will meet the demonstrated needs. The Federal EFC is the starting point, but schools that adopt the CSS Profile have slightly different tools. Yet, the answers are not hard to find. Neither are the history about schools. For instance, astute readers can read about how different Columbia is from NYU in terms of generosity.
All in all, people generally misunderstand ED or SCEA, and prefer to complain about it. Just as teachers complain about tests! Rather than maximize their chances or finding ways to beat the tests, they tend to engage in endless jeremiads.
blossom,
Its quite likely more full pay students are applying ED, so the high ED acceptance will capture a lot of full pay money.
I am not surprised - think about legacies and Ivies and ED this way:
- if the student does NOT apply to Penn (for example) ED, they are NOT sure that Penn is the one for them - they are not willing to commit 100%
- Penn’s alumni are their biggest cheerleaders and recruiters
- given the first two points, the alumni who had children who were iffy on going to Penn were NOT doing their job, which was and is promoting Penn as the best place in the world to go to college
Ergo, you go ahead to another Ivy, we aren’t your first choice so be happy somewhere else.
It is a much smaller benefit to a non-legacy non-athlete to apply ED.
BTW, I ran EFCs in the fall last year as part of NPCs, and the number was at least 5K lower, without my number changing, than this year’s FAFSA EFC calculation. I don’t think the EFC calculation is perfectly straightforward based on that evidence.