My Parents want me to Apply Early at an Ivy

[Data10]

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I have yet to see “borderline” applicants, who would not have gotten in RD but got an admissions “boost” from applying SCEA.

In an earlier post you wrote, “Princeton admissions is so much of a crapshoot that nobody really knows the chances of an applicant.” If you don’t know the chances of an applicant like you said earlier, how are you determining chances to the precision that you can tell who is borderline at just below the threshold where they would have been admitted RD?</p>

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Again, you can cite the numbers all day, but what is the substance of a 2% chance of admission versus a 19% chance? Is that a difference that translates materially? I’ll tell you - again, I have met Princeton kids who had low GPA/SAT and “weak” ECs, with no conceivable hooks or background advantages, each of whom is living his/her dream at Princeton. Your numbers would have said they were extremely unlikely to get in but there are a large number of them who are attending Princeton in spite of - rather, in defiance of - your beloved numbers.

This is getting silly. If you don’t think there a big difference between a 19% chance and a 2% chance, I can see why you aren’t concerned with an early application boost. Sure it’s possible to get accepted with lower stats. Nobody said it wasn’t, just that the chance of acceptance goes down as stats go down. Maybe your group of friends is full of persons with weak stats, but the data reported by Princeton for members of the class does not show this pattern. Instead Princeton has one of the highest 25th percentile test scores of any college in the US (tied with Harvard), with 25th percentile SAT scores of 700+.</p>

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First, the study is about how early decision round 2 applicants perform less well academically than their round 1 and RD peers.

The link was in response to your incorrect comment that the cited studies were unrelated to early admissions. I specifically quoted your comment in the response to avoid confusion. It was not an effort to show colleges favor ED apps, but if you want another cited study that draws a similar conclusion, one is at <a href=“https://www.msu.edu/~dickertc/Early%20Decision-full.pdf[/url]”>https://www.msu.edu/~dickertc/Early%20Decision-full.pdf&lt;/a&gt; . It found among a similar academic pool between ED and RD, yet the acceptance rate varied with 86% acceptance rate for ED vs 38% for RD.</p>