<p>Absolutely. If the current policy is as the OP was told, that is a big change from the past, and I don’t see any indication that anything has changed at all. I know several students who, in previous years, applied SCEA to Yale and to various rolling admissions state universities, and were accepted at the state universities as early as October. I am certain this was OK under the Yale rules.</p>
<p>The admissions officer may have gotten confused between the “public university rolling admissions” rule highlighted by wjb, which can be summarized as “anything nonbinding on the student is OK” and the separate “ED II” rule that follows it, which says you can apply ED II (but not ED I) elsewhere so long as the notification date is after January 1 (which means that you would have time to withdraw your application if you had been admitted to Yale and preferred to go there rather than the ED II college).</p>