<p>3togo, You make very good points to wait to send an application, however, you might also want to consider sending applications out, at least to schools that have Rolling Decisions so your kiddos aren’t too late and maybe to the safeties. </p>
<p>To do that, you’ll need to let the GC and other recommenders know and, importantly, you’ll have to set up the Common App to have alternate versions. (Look in their Help section for instructions. It’s easy to do, but to that, you’ll need to submit an application.)</p>
<p>If applying EA to reach schools, make sure to include EA to a safety type school. DS applied EA to 2 of the former, and decided to not do the latter. When 2 deferrals came in December, I sure wished he had at least one acceptance to soften the blow. He then did a rolling to State U (which fortunately came back in 3 days :D) which at least made him feel like <em>someone</em> wanted him. </p>
<p>If you only get rejection/deferral in December, it makes for a long wait til April.</p>
<p>My S is a Senior and I pushed him to apply EA wherever he could. I took him to visit most of the EA schools,where he is above the 75% on all but one of them, early on and got him excited about them. One if them he has been excited about applying to since he first heard about it as a Freshman. Of course that is the one that has a 27% admit rate. He is also one of those upward trend kids, so we did question waiting till RD so the schools could see his first semester grades, but he decided to go EA anyway. It is a hard decision though. His testing is done and his scores won’t keep him out anywhere. He is going to apply ED to his top choice that is a HUGE reach, and has an ED2 ready. He has already submitted a rolling, and also has gotten an early likely acceptance from a small LAC with a big merit award and grant, that covers almost full COA. He would be happy at ANY of his schools. He is a lop-sided kid, with high test scores but B+ grades, with unusual EC’s, so he needed a big list, as he is unsure about how schools will look at him.</p>
<p>I am really unsettled about my son’s choice to apply to one school SCEA (a reach, of course) instead of two reach EAs. I just don’t know if SCEA is worth it. My son doesn’t have a “number one” school, per se. He likes a number of schools for different reasons and feels he could be happy at any of them but he wants to stick with applying SCEA to this top school.</p>
<p>The thing is, the EA reach schools were never on his list but both schools have contacted him (baseball coach at one school and he’s attending a special visitation for URMs at another, which is paid for by the school) and that seems to say there’s at least a little interest in my son on their part, whereas his SCEA school doesn’t know he exists except for some emails with admissions and his visit there earlier in the year.</p>
<p>My son is a very strong candidate but admissions is such a crapshoot. Do I support his decision to apply SCEA and the rest RD? Can one apply SCEA and if rejected, is there still time to apply ED II at a school? For a family in the over 70, under 80K range, is ED too big of a risk?</p>
<p>Ugh. The strategy for applying to top schools is too stressful for me. I’m glad my son is excited about it even if he knows there will be rejection.</p>
<p>Boston College claims that their EA round is more competitive than their RD round since they limit the proportion of the class that comes from EA acceptances. I’ve always wondered how true that is.</p>
<p>A counselor I know showed me stats from Stanford and their REA was about 12% vs. 7% for RD so it seemed to be there is a slight advantage to EA. I wish I knew if there was an advantage-even slight-to SCEA.</p>
<p>This can be a significant downside. Both our girls applied SCEA, and one was deferred and later rejected and the other was rejected outright. In both cases it was looong, cold winter at our house. The rejections that came in RD stung a lot less because they were more than offset by all the acceptances that rolled in at the same time.</p>
<p>They both did great in RD and ended up at high-end schools they loved. So if I had it to do over again I’d urge them skip the early admissions and proceed directly to RD.</p>
<p>My niece had a similar experience to coureur’s DDs. It is really hard to get excited about writing more applications after early rejections and/or deferrals. My DD is applying to one “safety” and one reach EA, with the hopes that things will even out. She is not applying SCEA to the big reach, and our house rule is that you can only apply ED if all of your other applications are complete just shy of the submit button.</p>
<p>Also, keep in mind that all of the recruited athletes go in the EA/ED round, so the acceptance rates get a bit inflated. How much depends on how many spots a school reserves for athletic recruits.</p>
<p>Like Coureur’s daughter, my son applied SCEA and got an outright rejection by mid-December. He didn’t have an EA choice at any of his other schools, and he wasn’t that enamoured of the ED schools to apply to any of them. However, he had also applied to two state publics (one IS, one OOS) which had rolling admissions and got good news from both by mid-January. He also got good news from one of his RD schools in late February/early March, so he had good choices before March 31.</p>
<p>In retrospect I think that he was not fully prepared for the SCEA application and might have done better had he put more time into it.</p>
<p>If you don’t mind my asking, how do you think he could have more fully prepared for the SCEA application? </p>
<p>It sounds like it would be beneficial for my son to apply as early as possible to his SCEA school and also to his safety schools. So, if he gets rejected, he’ll hopefully hear from his safety schools early enough that it will take the sting out somewhat.</p>
<p>Can you apply to other (safety) schools if he applies SCEA? Rolling admission only, I think?</p>
<p>Anyhow, if he goes EA at other schools, suggest you look at Case Western EA also for the math/science oriented kid. Free app, no extra essays, generous merit money, (relatively) high acceptance rate for high stats kid. Good one to have in the back pocket.</p>
<p>This goes back to one of the points made by ellemenope back in post #2. Namely that the EA/ED application is usually the very first one that the kid fills out and submits. And like any other process, you get better at it with practice. With both my daughters their essays got better as they continued to adjust and polish them as they worked their way through their various apps. Same for short answers and other responses - thought of better ways to describe their ECS, etc. The apps just got better. </p>
<p>The EA school got app version 1.0. Like any initial release, it still had bugs and lacked some features that got added later.</p>
My son completed (almost) all of his RD applications before hearing back from the early school. This was a challenge, but we thought it was worth it to avoid the problem you describe.</p>
<p>We are trying to pace the applications. Today my son will make a list of the order of applications. The good news is that once he finishes the common app. essays this week, he will automatically be finished with two schools that don’t have essays.</p>
<p>My goal for my son is to have at least 4 schools done by Nov. 1st and all schools done by Dec. 1st. It’s a lot of work but Hunt brings up a great point and I’m sure that would be beneficial to my son to have them out of the way early enough to be maybe getting some good news even if he gets some bad news in December.</p>
<p>Also, he is running his essays by someone, so I figure they’re good enough and he’s not likely to improve all that much if he waits another month or two.</p>
<p>sbjdorlo - What coureur said (Post #53). In addition, my son was submitting a music CD. The SCEA school got a poorer version (it was redone after SCEA) of the CD. Even with SCEA, he was allowed to submit apps to rolling admissions schools. You just have to review the requirements of the schools (and now one of his rolling admissions schools calls it EA).</p>
<p>If you are going to do EA or SCEA, you really need to have the final polished version of your app done well before the deadline. If you think it needs improvement (essays, grades, test scores or EC-related), I wouldn’t do EA.</p>
<p>This is good feedback! My son will also be submitting a music CD but he’s not recording until Oct. 1st and 8th. Hmm, I wonder about this. It’s definitely true he could continue improving in his playing if he had 2 more months to do it. Hmm, you’ve certainly given me something to discuss with him!</p>
<p>Personally, I’m a big fan a few EA applications to match and safety schools hopefully yielding some acceptances to … 1) take off a lot of the pressure … and 2) allow the application list to shortened as some match and safety schools are fathomed.</p>
<p>For most schools, no, but in the case of Notre Dame, apply RD instead. ND is very harsh in its EA decisions, rejecting during EA at a high rate. Ask someone who goes to ND about it; it seems to to common knowledge among ND’ers but you don’t want to learn about this the hard way.</p>
<p>Generally most other schools only reject a small percentage of EA applicants, and defer most anyone who was not accepted during EA to the RD round.</p>