@VeryLuckyParent How is this possible? If you get into Penn ED and the aid is at least as much as you have indicated u need or more, you cannot break the contract. Also international rich kids don’t even apply for aid, so they do not have any way of breaking the contract. I strongly disagree that there is a considerable number of kids who pass up the opportunity of applying to their #1 choice in order to settle for a second-best more realistic choice. A kid applying to Penn ED as a non-legacy and non-athlete has to have very competitive stats to get in. This kind of applicant is not gonna risk eliminating the possibility of applying to its first choice by applying early to an ED school. So it is safe to say that most Penn early applicants genuinely have Penn as their first choice. When it comes to Chicago things are not so clear since it has EA and not ED and thus it is not binding, so one could easily apply to HYPSM RD but still apply EA to Chicago to increase their changes of getting into a good school. Also many early applicants at Penn apply to one of the famed dual degree programs (M&T, LSM, Huntsman, Vagelos, VIPER) for which people routinely turn down HYPSM, and also to Wharton , which there is a good number of very business-focused and pre-professional students who turn down YPSM for.