My Parents want me to Apply Early at an Ivy

[Data10]

<p>

Actually, the SCEA programs have numerous loopholes, allowing the applicant to apply early to other schools which are:

True, but the point remains that SCEA usually indicates first choice, as I wrote.</p>

<p>

If you’re going to take anything Princeton writes at face value, Princeton also writes the following

I’d be very surprised to see a selective college explicitly say that they favor early apps over regular, in a similar way to how colleges whose stats exhibit clear “Tufts syndrome,” with rejecting more qualified apps who are using the school as a safety, say that they have never practiced “Tufts syndrome.”</p>

<p>

See, if this were just an opinion, yes, I would credit the Harvard and Stanford professors. However, mine is empirical evidence gathered over the period of a year and a summer with dozens of actual Princeton students. Yes, you can crunch the numbers all you want, but you can’t beat actual case studies. The Harvard and Stanford professors also have little to no insight in the admissions process. Professors are hardly included in the admissions process. Therefore, their argument is reduced to mere numbers, which can always be beat.

Lets compare the two data sources:</p>

<p>Source 1 : A peer reviewed study involving a survey of ~2400 applicants, calculating rate of acceptance after factoring out strength of apps, many types of hooks, and more than a dozen factors in total</p>

<p>Source 2 : Knowing some students and presumably talking about their acceptances and or college app with some of them in such a way that you can tell if they had better chance of admission by applying with SCEA than they would with RD</p>

<p>Source #1 sounds more reliable to me. I also question whether talking to dozens of students gives you more insight in the admission process than Harvard/Stanford professors would have by researching admissions in multiple studies and writing a well known book on the subject. And of course, they also talked to students. I do accept that it’s possible that Princeton differs from most schools in the degree of early boost. However, I very much doubt that knowing a small subgroup of students would provide enough information to draw any conclusions. </p>

<p>

FYI, my roommate had a 3.75 GPA and 1900-range SAT. ECs were standard for Princeton. My friend had the grades, but only one or two ECs in which he showed any sort of dedication. By your system, both would have been rejected.

Was your roommate a poster in the Stanford RD thread on CC? Note that the post you quoted stated, “Obviously these rules would not apply well to all apps since the posters on CC are a unique subgroup that tends to be high-stat, well-informed students who attended quality high schools and took rigorous courses. There is also likely a bias towards posting accepted results and not posting rejected results.” The rules are also not expected to be the same for all CC RD threads. Stanford is particularly big on showing a passion and excelling in it, which correlates a higher weighting than most colleges on ECs/awards. In contrast Princeton has a reputation for placing a greater emphasis on stats than Stanford and a lower emphasis on ECs than Stanford (not zero weighting on ECs).</p>