<p>Yes, though EA and ED are very different, so it seems silly for the list to group them together. Rice actually had slightly LESS yield from their EA than from their regular decision accepted student! Anyhoooo…</p>
<p>In the original study, they found that applying ED gave the same advantage as adding 100 points of SAT. I gather that various changes reduced that differential. Would that be true at the small schools or is there still a big advantage to applying ED at the LACs listed (at the upper half of the list?</p>
<p>I think that it would be difficult to document the admissions advantage, particularly at LACs. For example, at small LACs, a significant % of the student body is varsity athletes. Coaches really work to get their athletes to commit ED, so a large number of ED admits are recruited and other athletes. At non need-blind schools, there are probably a disproportionate number of students in the ED round getting a bump for having low EFCs, so a lot of the apparent ED admissions advantage is actually coming from factors other than the fact that a student applied ED.</p>
<p>Admissions officers almost universally say that it is not “easier” to gain admission by applying ED. They say that the applicant pool is stronger than their RD applicant pool, so that the higher admissions percentages are deceptive. On the other hand I have heard of a few schools where if you are a legacy and hope that to work in your favor, you really have to apply ED. Of course admissions officers have an incentive to claim that there is no advantage in getting an acceptance by applying ED, they don’t want the game to appear to be rigged. I still suspect that there is a significant advantage, but I have never seen a school release enough data to clearly distinguish their applicant pools in such a way as to say that, say 35% of kids with a 3.5 GPA and 1900 SAT total got admitted ED, while for kids with the same stats only 25% got admitted RD. I’m sure the schools have those data and look at them carefully, but don’t choose to share them with the public.</p>
<p>Dad, I agree it would be great to see those comparisons, but some of these schools won’t even put Common Data Sets on their websites (Colgate, for example)! For most schools, I might believe that the ED applicants are as strong as the RD ones (the large majority of whom are rejected), but the real question is whether the admitted ED kids are as strong as the admitted RD kids.</p>
<p>As the father of two non-athlete, non-legacy, non-full-pay kids who attend LACs with 40-50% of their class from ED admits, I’ve always been of two minds about the whole ED phenomenon. On the one hand, it bothered me to know that my kids were competing for roughly half of the spots in their entering classes with roughly 90% of the applicants.</p>
<p>On the other hand, at least with the schools that aren’t need-blind, I was happy to know that if my kid did get in, the ED students make it possible for mine to afford the school (and I don’t mean the ED kids are paying for mine - it’s just that more full-pays allow for more endowment money to go to FA kids).</p>
<p>I still don’t really know if applying to a “need blind” school ED could have resulted in a lower FA offer - and I didn’t want to find out.</p>
<p>ericatbucknell has corrected me re Colgate’s CDS posting. It now has the current and past two years on its Institutional Research site. A good step forward.</p>
<p>[Colgate:</a> Institutional Planning and Research](<a href=“http://www.colgate.edu/DesktopDefault1.aspx?tabid=4156]Colgate:”>http://www.colgate.edu/DesktopDefault1.aspx?tabid=4156)</p>
<p>At schools that consider an applicant’s “interest” as a plus factor in admissions—and this would include most LACs–applying ED has got to be a positive. What stronger indication of “interest” could you possibly have?</p>
<p>Also, I’m not convinced need-blind colleges need to “cheat” on that commitment by a taking a sneak peek at ED applicants’ EFCs. It only stands to reason that the ED pool is heavily tilted toward full-pays and those with low financial need, because most applicants with high financial need want to do comparison shopping on competing FA offers before committing to a school. So simply by increasing the percentage of the entering class selected from the ED pool, colleges are pretty much guaranteed of hauling in a larger fraction of full-pays while still maintaining plausible deniability; they can say with a straight face that they never looked at anyone’s FAFSA or PROFILE in connection with the admissions decision. It will be interesting to see which colleges show a jump in the percentage of the entering class selected from the ED pool in this year of financial stress.</p>
<p>^ I don’t believe that colleges peek at FA info directly–but there are tons of ways to peek indirectly: ED, zip code, parental income, etc.</p>
<p>EricatBucknell: Where’s Oberlin? It’s #20 among LACs in USNWR and higher ranked than half the schools on your list.</p>
<p>^ He said that he couldn’t find current good information on oberlin, vassar, bard, and some other schools, so he left them out.</p>
<p>A student is probably only going to ED at the school that is the highest reach on his/her list. HYPSM have no ED, so the best of the best (who have an interest in attending one of these) will apply only to non-binding plans. </p>
<p>Penn, for example, probably has a weaker ED pool, mostly consisting of people who realize that they likely won’t get in anywhere more selective (with a few top candidates who consider it their #1 choice thrown in). Yet ED has a higher admit rate.</p>
<p>People whose ED reaches are a little further down (say, Haverford) will usually not be as qualified as people who can consider these colleges as a match (and who usually will not apply ED).</p>