<p>Interesting article in the Yale Daily:</p>
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<p>[Yale</a> Daily News - Yale uncertain about early yield](<a href=“http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/22480]Yale”>http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/22480)</p>
<p>Like the guidance counselor at CRH, our high school gc also took a firm stand to knock ED off its pedestal. He actively discouraged students not apply early basically using the same words quoted in the OP article - that the ED advantage is a myth.</p>
<p>That’s lovely rhetoric, and I have no trouble agreeing that it’s silly to think there’s any more than a very modest advantage in applying EA to a place like Yale or Stanford. But when you get into the ED schools, where the student is offering a commitment to attend – there, you have statistical evidence, logic, and straight testimony to tell you that there is a meaningful advantage. Even at the level of a college like Penn, which says that it will consider legacy status only for ED applicants, and certainly at colleges that are only a little less selective. </p>
<p>Of course, “advantage” doesn’t mean that every sow’s ear gets treated like a silk purse. Advantage means something like, if there were a pool of 100 kids with similar stats, and 40 of them would be accepted in the RD round, maybe 60 of them would be accepted in the ED round. That’s pretty meaningful, although not to the kids who get rejected anyway.</p>
<p>Last year Yale took about 19% of its EA candidates and less than 6% of its RD candidates. It is one thing for a guidance counselor at Choate Rosemary Hall to advise his students to wait. They are much less likely to be overlooked in the huge mass of RD applicants: Firstly, they are at Choate, and secondly they are undoubtedly advised and packaged to a degree undreamed of by the vast majority of brilliant public high school applicants. </p>
<p>The advantage may be modest. Perhaps it pales in comparison to the advantage enjoyed by his students no mater when they apply. But it is the only advantage to which most kids have access.</p>
<p>I do know a number of kids who were deferred during the ED round at Cornell. But to there credit, Cornell seems to give these kids a second chance in the RD round.<br>
So if their qualifications are comparable to the other RD applicants, a number of ED kids do get accepted through regular decision.
In certain instances, I do think it is helpful for a school to know that they are truly your # 1 choice.
The flip side is, my kid decided NOT to apply to U Penn. She wasn’t going to apply ED, and she thought she would have virtually no chance of admission by applying RD.
ED at Penn seemed to be a big advantage for admission.</p>
<p>myth???</p>
<p>More than one adcom has admitted in an info session that ED acceptances are a few % higher than RD, after excluding recruited athletes, legacy, development admits, etc. No, it ain’t a myth, at least at those schools.</p>
<p>I think people are conflating EA and ED, and that is part of the confusion.</p>
<p>At Vanderbilt, these (ED) students receive a slight admissions advantage. Basically, a student who is a borderline applicant in our Regular Decision pool will be admitted during the ED process. Students applying ED are saying that they LOVE VU, and we admissions officers respond to this by being a bit more generous in our admissions decisions.</p>
<p>My daughter’s counselor said that she was giving up her shot at Penn when she applied SCEA to Harvard. He was right; she did not get into Penn. </p>
<p>So many kids from our high school got into Cornell ED that higher ranked kids (who got into incredible schools) did not get into Cornell in the regular round.</p>