Hi, looking for advice on how to decide on SCREA/EA/ED. We have drawn a list of colleges, & based on general guidelines, experiences of family members/ friends in some of these colleges, brief visits to some others, locations, tuition, distance from home, college ranking etc,. We are now trying to figure out how to decide if & where should we SCREA or EA. Assuming the student is fairly competent to apply to HYPSM & all other top colleges - we are fully aware even though students have it all they still don’t get in to the top universities. We want to give it our best shot & maximize our chances. Top choices are Harvard, Stanford, Yale, MIT, UC’s Caltech. We understand the early acceptance percentage is skewed due to athletics & legacy etc. Is there any evidence of advantage in applying early, if student in non legacy, non athlete & not an international level achiever? Great grades, Great EC’s, will get good LOR’s,some awards etc, CA based, wants to do premed, so Harvard Yale & Stanford seem a little more appealing, as well as UCLA ( no early for UC’s). We have also visited all these campuses & have had siblings go to some of theses colleges. ( Each child is different & their personalities are different - we did not do early for them - their journey was different with one of them being a recruited athlete,)
What should we look at to help us make this decision - on the categories we have analyzed them they are similar for us. the student thinks it might be nice to go to the East coast just to experience living in a different part of the country, but not opposed to being close to home. Would appreciate feedback on how to evaluate and make this decision. Thanks!
I’d save ED for an absolute “I’m in love” favorite. There is no point gaming the system if it means your kid is locked in to a sub-optimal option.
I would not do Caltech for premed. It is a VERY hard and intense place; it will be hard to maintain the necessary grades and have some semblance of a social life. Others may disagree.
Otherwise, apply EA to any place that offers it while your kid works on the RD applications?
I generally believe the colleges when they say there is no EA/REA advantage. The higher acceptance rates also have to do with the fact that the strongest applicants tend to apply early – knowing whether you are in, deferred or rejected at an HYPSM has a lot of advantages. However, if your kid is a “tuba player” (unique/unusual talent), applying early may help as the limited spots for “tuba players” may be mostly taken by RD.
ED: use only for a top choice for which you would have no regrets committing early, even if other colleges give desirable admissions with desirable net prices.
REA/SCEA: use only if you are willing to give up other early applications that are restricted against (which vary depending on the college with REA/SCEA).
EA: generally, it is desirable to apply EA wherever possible and not restricted against by an REA/SCEA application. Some colleges fill up most of their classes or popular majors in EA.
Rolling: generally, it is desirable to apply early to rolling admissions colleges, since the colleges may fill up most of their classes or popular majors early, or give most of their scholarship money early.
There are schools like University of Maryland (College Park) where most of the admissions are done in EA, so that RD tends to be much more selective in general (not just for tuba players or other unusual types of applicants).
This should be considered in the context of your overall application strategy and the rest of the list. Applying SCEA/REA will prevent the student from applying EA to any other private university in the US. That may have implications for the applications for reachy, EA-preferring schools that would now all be RD applications. Your student may still get into most of these schools RD, but it still gives away any slight advantage of an EA application to a private school in the US.
Depends on which SCEA/REA school. HYPS and Caltech do include the restriction against applying to other US private colleges EA (as well as any ED application). But Georgetown and Notre Dame REA restrict only against ED applications, not other EA applications.
I wonder if they release a breakdown of how many legacy/athlete/others for early admits - that will give a true picture of the actual admit rate for HYPS. Thank you for your response.
I think that this is a good plan. To me, ED is only appropriate if there is a clear top choice, and the NPC shows it as affordable. From your original post, I did not see evidence of any one clear top choice.
Definitely budget for a full 8 years of university. If you are full pay for a full 8 years, you could easily run up $800,000 in cost and $900,000 might be possible. No one needs to spend this much on the way to being called “Doctor”. The students in highly ranked MD programs, or in any MD program, come from a huge range of undergraduate schools. However, it will be a lot easier to save money on the first four years compared to the last four years.
Certainly some students do attend MIT or Caltech as undergraduate students and then go on to medical school. However, keeping a high medical-school-worthy GPA is tough enough at pretty much any other school. I do not think that MIT or Caltech, both of which are very tough schools, are the right way to maximize the chances of admissions to medical school. Maybe, just maybe, the exception might be if there was some student who for some reason thought of one of these schools as a really great fit for them. Remember that every student at MIT and Caltech was near the top of their high school class, and they are not all going to be in the top half of the class in university.
This is compatible with our experience also!
I am not convinced that attending Harvard or Stanford or Yale will increase a student’s chances of ever getting to medical school. Yes these are great universities, and they get a relatively high percent of their undergraduate students into medical school. However, a lot of this, and some might speculate maybe all of this, comes from the excellent caliber of students who get into Harvard or Stanford or Yale in the first place. If you have the stats and test scores to get into Harvard, then four or five years later you might have the stats and test scores to get into medical school (having the drive and determination to get the appropriate medical experience might also be correlated with having the drive and determination to get accepted to one of these schools up front). A student who for example gets into all three of these schools, and who also gets into UC Riverside and UC Merced, might be a bit above average in very tough premed classes at UC Riverside or UC Merced, and have the same chance of getting into medical school regardless of which of these schools they attend.
And this of course means most likely applying EA wherever it is available, RD otherwise, get your acceptances back, and then decide where to go.
I agree with this also. One daughter applied to multiple schools with rolling admissions, and did get her applications in early. In addition to the advantages that you mentioned, there was another advantage: She got an acceptance quickly. Just having an acceptance in hand reduces the stress level on what is a stressful process for many students, even if you end up somewhere else. This same advantage may apply to EA applications.
The other thing that I would do would be to prioritize applications. First I would get applications into at least one and preferably two safeties, and to whatever schools the student is most interested in. Then I would do the rest again prioritizing whichever schools the student just feels comfortable with.
To me fit and budget are the most important things to look for. You are comparing a long list of very good universities (including ALL of the Universities of California).
I have been told that Stanford REA is mostly only worth it if you have legacy. Rumor has it that the legacy advantage applies in the REA round, but not in the regular round (and there is in fact some level of legacy advantage). Otherwise, if you are non legacy, it is said that REA doesn’t really confer any advantage. And it blocks you from other private school EA, so it has a cost. However, I do not have a definite source for this, it is just what people say.
(The only reason I looked into this in the past is that I am an alum, so my children fall into the legacy category. Neither one ended up applying to Stanford at all, though.)
So for my S24 this ended up easy. He did have a favorite, with SCEA/REA, and he didn’t have any privates on his list with regular EA, so there was really no downside to applying SCEA/REA. He did apply early to a public with rolling and St Andrews in Scotland, but those are exceptions.
And if you are not looking at other privates with EA, or I guess just one other, then I think you don’t even need a clear favorite SCEA/REA college. The whole point of non-binding EA is really just to get an early answer, so you can just pick whichever you would like most for an early answer, and then see how you feel after getting that answer.
Or non-answer–my S24 was deferred. C’est la vie.
If you are looking at multiple other privates with EA, then would you rather (maybe) get early answers from those, or (maybe) get an early answer from an REA/SCEA? I don’t think this is a high stakes question, but thinking of it that way may be clarifying enough.
180 to 210 athletic recruits each year for Yale. Assume the vast majority are REA. For the Class of 2029, 11% of 1,640 entering freshmen had legacy affiliation, so about 180 but not all apply early and some accepted may have decided to go elsewhere. There will also be a handful of development admits who are not legacy and children of faculty. You can play around with numbers but it would not be a far off guess that 300 REA admits out of about 800 have hooks of some type.
Many colleges require students to apply through EA to be considered for merit scholarships or honors programs. Some also fill a large portion of their freshman class through EA.
These are additional reasons to apply through non-binding EA.
But almost all such programs are exceptions to the REA/SCEA rules, usually through the public exception, for good reason. Those colleges don’t typically want you to have to choose beween those sorts of reasons to apply EA and their REA/SCEA program.
The one notable counter-example I am aware of, meaning a private where EA is necessary for full scholarship consideration, is USC, for which Stanford makes an additional exception, but I believe the others do not. Of course there may be more than USC, I just know of that one.
So if that was a consideration for you, that could be a reason to choose Stanford versus another.
@Gumbymom can clarify, but I didn’t think the UCs had an early application.
Why? This student can take the required courses for medical school admissions at almost every four year college in this country. I realize you want a very competitive and challenging college environment, but this will be the case at just about any college if this student takes the required courses for medical school admissions.
I’m not sure Caltech is a good option. It is a research based university. @aunt_bea please, can you elaborate.
Would your student consider colleges like Case Western University, University of Rochester?
But it does not look like Yale or Princeton have the “USC exception”.
Georgetown and Notre Dame REA exclude only ED and do not restrict against EA to other schools.
It would not be surprising if HYPS were mostly concerned with excluding multiple EA applications within that set of schools, and are not that concerned about EA applications to public or other private schools. Caltech may be mostly concerned with excluding EA to both it and MIT.