@BldrDad -I wish I could say with certainty that schools like UChicago would accept me RD anyway, but I’m not really sure that’s the case. I’ve seen a number of the breakdowns of EA versus RD acceptance rates at HYP, showing that most of those schools’ EA acceptance rates are 4 or 5 times the RD rate. But ultimately, that’s still 4 or 5 times a rate of 3% or less, with over 35,000 applicants for the ~1,000 spots that are filled during RD. And the U of C, just like HYP, fills about half its freshman class during the EA round of applications, so I’d be accepting a significant decrease in my odds there.
The main cautionary tale I look at is that of a senior at my school who’s currently waiting on decisions from his RD unis. He passed on what our school’s guidance counselor estimated would be a 60-70% chance as an EA applicant to the U of C, applied SCEA to Princeton, and was deferred. Now he’s in limbo. I wouldn’t ordinarily generalize based on a sample size of one, and this is still far from a reliable analysis, but this student has a very similar profile to mine: (SAT, extracurriculars, and grades almost exactly the same-down to taking part in 4-5 of the same clubs and having SATs within 30 points of each other).
The only difference of note between the two of us is that I’m a legacy at UChicago, but I don’t feel that that would be enough to make acceptance there likely in the event of my applying RD.
And again, with UChicago’s site saying the following:
If my application is considered in the context of an international student’s, as this paragraph would seem to suggest, I feel that I’m anything but a sure bet, even as a US dual national, and that an EA application might be what makes the difference. In RD, it seems that international applicants to Ivy equivalents need to be really exceptional to have even a 35-40% chance, and while I’m a strong applicant, I wouldn’t call myself a great one even by US standards. This with the caveat that I don’t have a large body of experience to draw from.