Yes. That’s where I’m at. I got nervous when he started considering ED but after the insights shared on this thread, I’m feeling like I can get behind our son on ED as a possible strategy. He may ultimately opt for RD, but I’ve made peace with both paths and can better support him.
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This, 100%. Dream school is a bit of a cringe-y term to me. Only in a dream is everything perfect about one school and no others. Reality is usually something else.
With that said, the vast majority of students end up happy with where they land, and except for those who transfer, they get no chance to compare their experience with what might have been elsewhere. A good experience or a bad one is often the result of some serendipity. Or a
general disposition - some of us are more prone to regret and others rarely look back.
It sounds like you are thinking about this correctly in adjusting for you son’s perspective.
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I’m also in this one-of-each camp.
D22 was primarily interested in high-prestige schools - a few of them had ED that appeared to give at least a slight boost, but her top two choices did not. Having run the NPCs, I was comfortable with ED to her 3rd choice, which I always believed was perfect for her anyway, but she was insistent that she just had to know whether she could be admitted to the top choices. So she applied RD everywhere. Rejected at 1st choice, accepted at 2d choice with much less aid than expected, accepted at 3d choice with very generous aid. Ended up at 3d choice, which was a fantastic experience (:pats self on back:).
D26 is a pragmatic person. As a dad who doesn’t love shopping in the first place, I actually do love shopping with her: “I need Product X…They have three choices…I like this one…Let’s go.” We visited several LACs, and she fell in love with one and immediately started asking about ED. I was comfortable with the NPC; she applied ED and was accepted in December. She has no regrets and in fact was thrilled to be done with the shopping part so quickly. Could she have potentially fallen in love with various other schools, including some that might have been a marginally better fit? Yes, absolutely. There was a fair amount of happenstance involved. But knowing her, I am confident that she will never give that a second thought.
So…as everyone is saying, it does depend on the kid.
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Just to toss in another story, my S24 applied REA to his top choice and was deferred, and then faced the question of whether to ED2 his second choice. Between being deferred and not rejected by his top choice, and not being 100% sure his second choice was actually his second choice, he went RD instead.
He was then rejected RD by the REA school, accepted RD by the possible ED2 school, flirted with some other options, but ultimately did choose the possible ED2 school.
I think for him, it was important to have a more deliberate process, but he also got “lucky” in the sense his possible ED2 school admitted him anyway. If that hadn’t happened, would he have regretted not applying ED2? Fell in love with somewhere else? Who knows?
It is unfortunate this is all so complicated and puts this sort of pressure on kids to decide what to do in ways they might well regret. All of which is support for the notion that our role as parents may be just helping them understand the decision, and then supporting them after they have decided as best we can.
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OP- I think it’s perfectly fine for a kid to see themselves happy and challenged at multiple places and to roll the dice on the one where they think they’d get a possible boost with ED. My concern is always for the kid who really really really wants to go to College A, GC says “that’s a really big reach” so kid ED’s to college B because “I don’t want to waste my ED” and then in April watches kids with much less rigorous profiles getting in to College A. And then the coulda shoulda woulda’s start. Or the for the late bloomers who grab on to the certainty of ED when a little more time would give them some breathing space. And of course- the kids who fling in the ED application, get rejected (not even deferred) and are then too demotivated to do a quality job on the remaining applications. None of these sound like your kid, however.
I will relate a funny anecdote- one of my kids had “rigor of the engineering program” as the single most important screener when looking at colleges. Weather- unh, ok, it’s fine. Food- who cares, dorms- cruddy is OK, I’ll be with my friends I assume, city/rural, indifferent. And since it’s a kid who historically had made friends easily, had tons of interests outside of academics, had always made lemonade out of lemons, we weren’t too concerned with this somewhat one dimensional college search.
And then the kid visited U Chicago (we were there visiting family so we decided to do an impromptu visit/tour/lunch. And suddenly engineering went out the window.
In the end it didn’t matter- and we all understood the appeal of Chicago. And in fact, kid did NOT major in engineering (although cycled through several majors first), and there’s no doubt in my mind that kid would have been perfectly happy at a college with no (or at least very limited) engineering options.
But “just in case”… it’s worth testing your kid’s assumptions before that ED application goes in. Turns out “rigor of the engineering program” was just a placeholder for “wants a somewhat nerdy environment where people love learning and are ready to trade off other things for intellectual engagement”.
Your kids sound great!!!
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That’s a great story about testing assumptions before ED. And interestingly, my older son also fell in love with UChicago and is now a student there.
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If you tell me your older son wanted rural close to ski slopes and hiking trails i will have my chuckle for the day. Chicago seems to help kids throw their criteria out the window!!!
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OMG I say this all the time, and people look at me like I have 3 heads!
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Personally, I think this depends on the college, a lot.
If you have an HS with really good Naviance/scoir data and lots of kids applying, you can see a clear benefit at some universities, but not others IME/O…. One of my kids’ schools has one single digit college with 60%+ ED acceptance rate (no athletes, I doubt much legacy to this one specifically, but lots of full pay). This isn’t northeastern either 
That said, many it doesn’t seem to matter much. I don’t think it matters for MIT at all to do EA…
For the schools that admit they care for DI and have good financial aid (Northwestern, Dartmouth, Wash U, off top of my head), it should matter a little bit to apply ED, honestly. It is ultimate DI.
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I think Northwestern and Wash U- yes, a smidge. Resounding no on Dartmouth. It is such a “fit” school, that DI via ED doesn’t really move the needle. If you have what they are looking for– and what they know works way up in Hanover- terrific. If you are applying because of a perceived statistical advantage vs. Princeton– no.
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At any school you need to match the criteria though… obviously if they don’t think you will succeed there you aren’t getting in! Many kids do.. we are only talking about moving needles as an advantage at that level. Dartmouth, more than most, really likes match and to be loved. Ed is a strong indication of that.
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An admission officer at Johns Hopkins told my daughter bluntly that ED gives an admissions advantage. Might have changed in the last 6 years, but I doubt it. I don’t think it helps at all at Stanford, Harvard, Princeton or MIT - which incidentally don’t have ED, only EA or REA. I think for those with ED it varies by magnitude but is not inconsequential.
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I note WashU had a really strong reputation in S24’s feederish HS, and in fact he ultimately chose it. When looking at SCOIR, I saw no evidence of any sort of ED difference, and also no evidence of yield protection.
I have heard from others, though, who saw something different in their high school’s data.
I suspect this reflects a complicated truth. Colleges like WashU may well have the data to basically know that high numbers applicants from S24’s high school are more likely to yield than otherwise similar high numbers applicant from otherwise similar high schools elsewhere. And that may mean applying RD to WashU is less risky for high numbers applicants from S24’s high school.
I think the practical implication of all this is that yes, if your high school has enough recent prior applicant data to a college you are considering for ED, you probably want to carefully review that.
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Of the 6 kids from our school who got into JHU this year, 5 were ED. School does relatively well there - around a third accepted, the majority of these ED (3 years’ data from Maia). Most of the rejections are RD.
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This isn’t really adding anything that hasn’t already been mentioned, but my personal thought is that – while I get the strategy of using ED if the kid just wants to maximize their chances of getting into a “top” (to them) school – I wouldn’t do that unless the kid loves the school and knows that there would be no regrets about the fave(s) to which they did not apply, or pulled apps from when the ED came through.
Here’s my worry, expressed anecdotally:
Parents and kid are pragmatic. The kid has a 4.0 and 1550, but no hooks. All are zeroing in on T20s to “maximize kid’s potential”. The kid loves Yale, but fears rejection. So the kid EDs to Rice because it also features residential colleges – a fine school, no doubt. Kid gets into Rice, but always wonders whether they would have been admitted to Yale.
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I note there are some colleges with ED where the ED admit rate is basically the same as the RD admit rate. These are not the most famous colleges with a lot of ED applicants, but places like Rochester or the University of Denver.
At a high level, I think this means ED possibly having some significance for unhooked applicants is largely limited to a sort of intermediate range of colleges. The most generally-valued colleges with the highest RD yields tend either not to have it, or do things like explain it doesn’t help. The colleges that don’t get a lot of ED applicants anyway, and really need to fight for their most valued RD admits with merit and such, may not use ED in a way that helps either.
But there are then certain colleges that fall in between that might well waitlist or reject some highly qualified unhooked applicants in RD that they would accept if they applied ED. These are often colleges of interest to the population represented here at CC, but in the greater scheme they are a relatively narrow slice of the US college universe.
American is one of these.
That definitely happens sometimes.
I think part of what is important in these cases is how the kid (or sometimes parents) view the alternatives to both the most-desired college AND the “strategic” ED college.
Like, suppose it is true if the hypothetical kid applied SCEA to Yale and RD to Rice, they would get admitted to neither. Of course the proposition that applying ED to Rice would change their mind is not at all certain. But supposing it were true they could get into Rice ED but not RD, where do we imagine this kid actually ending up for college if they apply RD to Rice and don’t get an offer, nor from Yale?
My personal experience with the sorts of kids who could get into Rice ED is they are very likely to get into some other great colleges. Indeed, they might well get into other private research universities ranked as high or higher than Rice, or perhaps LACs that have comparable standing in the LAC world.
Even if not, they are unlikely to “fall” very far (in terms of rankings/selectivity), unless perhaps they choose to chase merit, or particularly like some in-state option (maybe with honors and/or merit as well).
But I guess if you are the sort of person who thinks the difference between “T20” and a bunch of other colleges that are not ranked quite that highly on that list (including LACs that aren’t ranked on that list at all) really matters, you may see those as big negative consequences.
But personally, I just don’t think that way.
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Yep. And in certain circles, this practice is actually called Tufts Syndrome.
I think American and Tufts share a common factor: they are both located in highly-desired metro areas, but not considered among the most generically-valued colleges in that metro. So I think they likely do get a lot of high numbers kids treating them as backup options to a relatively long list of other colleges they would prefer if they got an offer.
A college like Rochester, though, doesn’t experience much of that sort of effect. Not that they are going to be highest on every list, but people are only going to have them on their list if they actually have some significant interest in what Rochester specifically offers, as opposed to where it is located.
Or, for that matter, as opposed to how “impressive” it is to peers if they get admitted.
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Don’t forget some of the ED rate is for athletes or other hooked kids. I know a kid at JHU this year who never would have been accepted without being an athletic recruit. Personally, I don’t think JHU was the right choice for him but they wanted him so there you are.