<p>Unfortunately, that’s really not likely to happen, for a couple of reasons:</p>
<p>First, as you probably know, the whole topic of ED is a little controversial. Because it requires applicants to be organized, decisive, and ready to go two months early, the ED system favors applicants who are relatively sophisticated and well-advised (i.e., relatively affluent). Because it requires that accepted applicants withdraw their other applications, it effectively excludes anyone who feels he needs to compare financial aid offers (i.e., anyone who isn’t very affluent, or in some cases very poor). So colleges are pretty careful about what percentage of their class they take ED, and the percentage has tended to go down rather than up as more criticisms are leveled at the ED system.</p>
<p>Northwestern is at the very low end of ED schools in what percentage of the class they fill, but they are proud of the fact that they keep their ED program to only 25% of the class. Plus, now that they are deferring applications to the RD round, they aren’t in the position of rejecting good applicants they would like to accept anymore. Finally, it’s pretty rare that ED applications go up and RD applications stay flat or go down. By the time they make their final ED decisions, they will have a pretty good idea of how many RD applications they will be getting, and if it’s any kind of an increase they are not likely to want to take slots away from the RD pool.</p>