So if I understand this correctly, the fallacy that the OP is claiming only applies to about 20 top schools in the country. Is he still conceding that it is not a fallacy for the vast majority of schools and students?
“Unfortunately, colleges and universities are still businesses. ED allows them to lock down guaranteed funds and eliminates some of the uncertainty that waiting on the RD applicants creates.”
Exactly. More leverage and less risk for them, which means more risk and less leverage for the consumer - the applicant.
@me29034 Maybe, just because the college doesn’t advertise it will meet financial need doesn’t mean it won’t. So the final decision is always left to the applicant as to whether the FA is enough. Also I don’t believe in paying the premium on the tuition unless the school has an exceptional cohort, but that is another thread.
When colleges like Chicago accept a HUGE percentage of applicants ED and ED2, there are alot less spots for the rest of us.
^^^My kids (school) experience exactly! If you know you’re going to full pay (which wealthy students do) you really take advantage of ED.
If the Common App was dropped and kids had to fill out individual applications, this silliness would end. An app that requires a decent amount of work shows interest. If the US News rankings didn’t matter to the schools, that would help as well. For the colleges, it’s all about yield. They want kids who want to go there. When I was at Northwestern, there were kids there moaning that they didn’t get into Stanford, Brown, etc., and that was a bummer since NU was my first choice. So, I understand why schools want kids who want them but there has to be a fairer way.
Why should our kids have to decide so early where their “favorite” school is? I swear our S19 is changing rapidly. The school he may like the best in Oct may not be the best school for him in April. So, we will not have him apply anywhere ED. And he will show as much love as possible to all of his RD schools that track interest. It will be a lot more work but what’s the alternative? A few of his schools interview and I’m tossing around the idea of him telling the interviewer that his parents won’t let him ED anywhere. If he really, truly has a perfect fit then he will tell the interviewer the school is his first choice. Of course, I will only let him do that if it’s true.
And I cannot stand that kids sometimes use ED as a leg up to a school they haven’t visited or researched. Hopefully, those kids get rejected. It’s become a game. Trying to figure out where to ED has become less about applying to your favorite school and just applying to the one that takes the largest percentage of kids ED to increase the student’s chances.
@suzyQ7 We will be full pay but we don’t know that we will have to pay that. S19 is applying to a number of schools that give merit. So, we’d like to decide after RD and see where all of the chips fall. Full price for X-school versus a little money at Y-school. Maybe we end up choosing X-school, but we want to have the chance to make that decision.
I’m curious whether the effect described above “When I was at Northwestern, there were kids there moaning that they didn’t get into Stanford, Brown, etc., and that was a bummer since NU was my first choice.” has really changed with ED. From what I can tell, a lot of ED kids are like, well NU (or Penn or Chicago, or any of the other heavy users of ED) was the best place I thought I had a good shot at with ED. Wasn’t wiling to risk HYPSM, didn’t think that would work ,etc. Maybe just eliminating applying to other places straight out lessens the effect, and creates more of a psychology of choosing the ED school, even if under the threat of not getting in if you don’t do ED.
I’m against ED because I think many kids change too much from Sep of senior year of HS to August of the start of college, and delaying the decision until April or May can be a big difference. I may be either a dinosaur in persisting in this view, or not fully appreciating how sophisticated the elite kids filling up the ED slots are.
@homerdog Your post, #24, could have been exactly describing my son and our thoughts–each school he visits is the new “favorite”, albeit they are similar, semi-rural LAC or smaller universities. It would be a disservice to him to apply ED anywhere.
To further your point, we qualify as Full-Pay also—(I still shake my head at that —but my thoughts digress). Although ED may be a “leg up” I can’t help think that being “Full Pay” that has to be a leg up in the RD round for some of these schools where you are an academic match and have good ECs. Also, if you are Full Pay, why not to see the choices laid out in March. Except for super-selecitves, and the “big names”---- I imagine it’s a buyers market right now for the Full Pays.
I have heard that one of the reasons that Northwestern went to ED, was exactly what @turtle17 was alluding too. That a chunk of kids who ended up there were disappointed not to be somewhere else, so by using ED, they insure they have a lot of kids who really want to be there and love the school. That can really impact the vibe of the school for the better.
Conversely, I heard an admissions director at a LAC say there is a higher % of kids transferring out that had gotten in at the ED round.
It occurs to me that part of the problem—and yes, I would argue passionately that this is a problem—is that applicants (and their parents) have been duped into believing that there is, for every student, their One True Soulmate College, and the best outcome is for the student to go to that one (singular) school.
No. Just no. The choice of going to any school out there involves tradeoffs, even if that tradeoff is just that you can’t have the pluses of the places you don’t go.
Really wanting to go to a particular school and being disappointed that you end up going to another just as good for you school (which then becomes repackaged in your mind as not quite as good, and something you’re settling for) is both a triumph of marketing and, honestly, a manifestation of the results of hubris.
I think a big big part of what drives ED, is that for kids who are aiming for top tier schools, they see the admit rates getting lower and lower every year, and that especially for an unhooked kid, makes them very nervous. ED is a way for them to slightly improve their chances
The solution is for colleges to improve the Net Price Calculator so that students and families can get a realistic idea of how much a college will cost before deciding whether to apply ED. The Federal government required schools to use a Net Price Calculator to provide some transparency around the costs. However, when you attempt to use it, the first thing it tells you is that it doesn’t apply to students who have divorced parents, whose parents are self-employed or own a business, or a bunch of other criteria. It wouldn’t be that hard to create software that takes these situations into account. Really – divorced parents? That applies to approximately half of all students! With a better NPC, students can make better decisions about where to apply. My daughter is considering applying ED to her top choice school. I was able to sit down with the financial aid office and get a better understanding of how they handle situations like ours. They didn’t give me exact numbers, but gave me enough information so that we could make a decision. Several other schools, however, wouldn’t give me this kind of information when I asked. In part, I think it’s because the junior financial aid officers may not actually know how their programs come up with the numbers.
@dfbdfb and @wisteria100 are right, in my opinion. For most people, there are lots of colleges that they could be happy at, but the college search process has been given a romcom narrative where you traipse around the country kissing frogs until you walk through the gates of some campus and know that you’ve found the one. Most of this is a huge waste of time, I think, driven by the fact that if you’re paying a $65k sticker price to attend a top-tier school, you feel better about it if you think you’ve captured a unicorn. The colleges play to this by marketing themselves as luxury goods providing a curated “experience”.
I estimate that two-thirds of the applicants to Harvard are academically qualified and would do fine there if admitted, but Harvard has a 5% admit rate. So even though the qualified people are confident they’d be happy at Harvard if they were so fortunate as to get an offer, the clearheaded ones adjust their expectations and focus on colleges where they’re a match, and where they’re going to be happy whether or not they know it yet.
This, I think, is why so many of the savvier kids apply ED - they know that they could be happy at many schools, and are just trying to maximize their chances at the place that’s top on their list but where they have a reasonable shot at being admitted. Some students’ rankings are driven by perceived prestige, but that doesn’t particularly bother me; the student is going to get a good education wherever they go if they put in the effort and maximize their opportunities.
Of course, making it difficult for students with divorced parents to get financial aid helps the college keep its financial aid expenditure down.
Everyone wants special consideration for his situation but expects the NPC to consider all kinds of special situations. The NPCs actually work pretty well for FAFSA only schools (the majority). Those I used for my kids were exactly right, spitting out that they would get no need based aid and the merit aid for their statistics. If I changed the statistics a little, the NPC showed how much more or less they would get.
Agreed, but only to a point.
For large numbers of us out there merit aid fits into the picture, and NPCs are astonishingly uneven with regard to that.
Some schools offer purely stats-based merit aid, and so many but not all of them include that in their NPC results, but even the ones that do don’t necessarily say they’re doing so, so it can be hard to tell whether what you’re seeing is need-based aid only or what it would actually cost.
For the schools that offer competitive merit aid, it’s of course going to be less transparent, because they can’t predict for you who’s going to get it. But, again, some schools mention the possibility while others don’t (and others offer a pointer to the webpage that lists the possibilities, though often without dollar amounts given). (The really devious ones appear to give results that show competitive merit aid as if it were definitely going to be awarded to the student filling out the NPC; this should IMO be utterly disallowed.)
TL;DR: NPCs are good and useful, but they aren’t remotely a panacea.
(FWIW, my D17 is at a college that offered an astonishingly good competitive merit aid package after she was admitted RD. Would the school have offered the same package if she’d been admitted ED, and so they didn’t have to do anything to get us to let her attend there? We’ll never know, will we?)
“It seems that I have read quite a bit about how unfair ED is to low and middle income applicants. I find that these arguments don’t hold a lot of water with me.”
The unfairness is not only being locked in (any econ course says limiting choice is bad for the consumer) but also that applying early means the high school has to be on top of things for deadlines - recommendations, testing, etc, which was alluded to in an earlier post. These are more likely to be found in wealthier school districts with staff dedicated to college apps.
Locking in students is a predatory tactic (also practiced by tech companies) where limiting choice tilts the process, unfairly, to the college.
“Applicant applies ED to Vanderbilt and is subsequently accepted, before making a choice to accept the admittance to Vanderbilt, the college will send the applicant their FA package. Based on the FA package the applicant can either choose to attend or reject the university.”
Ok, but this can also happen if Vanderbilt had EA or SCEA right? Applicant applies to Vandy EA, gets in, evaluates FA package and either accepts or waits till May to accept/reject based on what happens in RD. Except the student has a lot more choices. The only benefits of ED are to the college, the student has the same exact benefits - relief of getting in to a top choice, a FA package to evaluate, decision to pull out of apps in colleges they’re not longer considering. Let me summarize:
ED - spot in freshman class, FA package, no choice
EA - spot in freshman class, FA package, choice of more schools and FA packages
It’s not hard to figure why ED gets a bad reputation, because guess what, it’s bad for the student.
Trying to decipher among all the different options, I contacted the financial aid department of a highly selective. Being a first time college parent going through this foreign process, I was appalled at the attitude I received. My questions were about ED and EA and the offering of FA after a spot was offered. I was specifically inquiring about small business owners and how the FA factors were taken into consideration. One doesn’t purchase a yacht without understanding the purchase price,… even the Warren Buffet wants numbers. I was told I would fill out the FA and be given a number but that I am expected to attend no matter the number. Say what? What am I missing here?
First of all, little about college admissions is fair so…
But if you’re going to have ED at a top school, do it like Columbia and exclude state schools (that at least returns a bit of negotiating power to student, though, technically if a school is full-need they shouldn’t really be negotiating - the need number should be the need number… but life ain’t exactly like that.)
Ideally, ED should be an agreement among peer schools. If a kid knows they want to go to Penn even if they get into Brown, JHU and U Chicago, why have all 4 of those schools (and the student) jump through hoops/waste time.
There is one easy fix if finances are a potential concern: ED schools should either have a “guaranteed” EFC calculator pre-applying, or should allow application to State schools or Merit Aid schools as well.
@dfbdfb I hear you about ED and merit. We have a few schools on S19’s list that look like he may have a decent shot at merit. One of them is in the lead for S19 so far. If that school is far and above the other schools next year, I still can’t in good conscious have him apply ED because we could be losing thousands in merit. I see no reason why a school would give merit money to anyone going ED unless it’s maybe part of a complete package that includes loans, maybe work study, etc. Since we are full pay and they can see we have the money, the school has no reason to make up a package for us. I don’t see why they would throw any merit our way unless they think he may go elsewhere and want him.
It’s such a game. I don’t like it.