Honestly, I predict that ten years from now ED will be gone. But not because of some lawsuit alleging some hard to quantify damages (how much is the right to compare financial aid packages worth anyway?) But because the colleges determine that the cost and pain of administering and managing different deadlines and responding to queries and being transparent (or at least more transparent) regarding admissions is “too much squeeze and not enough juice”. The old way of colleges getting a “first look” at what they thought would be the top of the admit pile (kids who want them badly enough to commit upfront) has become a costly and complicated multi-month process with every more complicated algorithms trying to predict who is going to yield at what rate when and by the way is summer melt happening in June or August? The predictability of their ED admits is great of course- but not when it skews the pool so that the RD admits have to compensate for too many things- fewer prep school kids, PLUS fewer athletes and more musicians or poets, PLUS too many or too few women majoring in computer science PLUS we can’t have an entire class from New Trier and Belmont High, can we? PLUS who the heck is going to take “The History of the Supreme Court” if every ED kid is a premed or electrical engineer PLUS PLUS PLUS.
As the ED numbers tick upward, the pressure on the RD process gets more intense. So I predict the pendulum swinging back. Recruited athletes in the early round. Staff and faculty kids in the early round. The Physics Olympiad winner from Bhutan is located and encouraged to apply early. And everyone else- deadline is Jan 1 like the good old days.