“There’s no high-minded principle at work here. Given the number and quality of apps that HYMPS routinely get, there’s little incremental benefit from getting many thousands more apps from students who are overwhelmingly unlikely to be admitted.”
Don’t Y and P receive approximately the same number of applications as UChicago? It’s H and S who are already in the lead here and may not benefit from thousands more. Any school that receives 30,000+ applications is going to be able to fill their class with top kids - there’s no evidence of a quality difference between any of them.
“These schools also don’t want to fill a majority of their spots ED because it means that they have to reserve most of the class for students that were willing to rank them first and are full payers (since that’s the other thing ED filters for), which is a relatively small subset of the applicant pool.”
There are PLENTY of SCEA applicants who won’t file for fin. aid. because they are worried it’ll hurt their chances. And now with the Empower Initiative, there’s no reason for a low SES kid who really wants to go to UChicago NOT to apply ED. Some won’t, simply because they would be counselled to keep their choices open given their stats, demographic, etc.
The main reason why HYPS doesn’t admit ED is that it doesn’t have to - they know their yield rates from the early pool. SCEA is a nice way of forcing the applicant to specify “first choice” w/o having to sign anything. Why else would you forego competitor schools in the early round?