He applied early action, not early decision. However, as I’m sure you know, early action still increases one’s odds of acceptance. Also, (again with many schools) there can be a big difference when considering one’s declared study/major (e.g., my son’s is not engineering, which gave him a leg up at SCU, as SCU is a hugely competitive school for engineering - especially given their location and being so heavily recruited by Silicon Valley companies for their engineering school grads).
As such, SCU’s engineering school acceptance rate is clearly lower than their overall rate as a university. So when looking at rankings like US News and World Report’s ranking of SCU at #54 among national universities - vs. UW’s #62 - one would think my son would have more than an excellent chance with UW.
But factor in UW’s non-participation in early action/decision + their mandate from WA lawmakers to accept an overwhelming percentage of WA residents (currently about 80+%… which doesn’t bode well for my non-resident son), and voila… his odds of a UW acceptance shrink to below that of SCU.
This is just another example of how making apples-to-apples comparisons in this whole crazy process is virtually impossible. Speaking of crazy… on the money side of things, out of state tuition for UW - while certainly less than that of SCU - is still (“all in”, aka, ‘total cost of attendance’) in the neighborhood of $60k.
Again, to be clear, this is for a public university, and an approx. “all in” cost for a non-resident. The US News & World Report ranking for my own home state’s university (which is actually larger than UW) is only 8 spots lower than UW, it’s ranked at #70… not too shabby. And If one considers USN’s stated “4,300 post-secondary schools nation-wide”, it’s all pretty impressive for both our state’s university and UW. That said, my home state’s resident cost is 1/3 cost that of the non-resident cost UW. That’s a tough difference to ignore.