What are the advantages and disadvantages of early admissions to universities?
Early admission or early decision?
ED you are committed to the school so you may always wonder if you would have been accepted to another school, gotten more FA, decided to go to a different school.
EA? The advantage is you know earlier that you’ve been admitted but you don’t have to decide in Jan or Feb.
Okay, thank you so much.
if EA is with a private institution, you can’t apply to ED/EA to another private institution. You are OK to apply EA with another public institution though. Please read the EA policy of individual school.
That’s not entirely correct. There’re different types of EA to private colleges. The most restricted type is called SCEA (or Single Choice EA) for which an applicant isn’t allowed to apply to any other early admission program (EA or ED). SCEA is used by Harvard, Yale and Princeton (Stanford calls its program Restricted EA but it is essentially SCEA). Georgetown and Notre Dame practice another type of restricted EA for which an applicant can apply to another EA program but not ED program. The third type of EA program is totally unrestricted. Applicants are free to apply to any other early admission program (EA or ED) as long as the other program allows it. The only private schools that practice this type of completely unrestricted EA are MIT and Caltech.
One disadvantage to EA is that your GPA might go up, or you may get a higher SAT score and your record won’t reflect that.
Other advantages to EA:
- Some schools only offer merit aid and honors college admission for students who meet the EA deadline.
- Some schools don't limit EA numbers so you have a better chance of acceptance applying early.
- Psychological security of having an early acceptance in hand can make the whole process much less stressful.
Cons:
- You need to be organized with your application, essays, and LoRs early
- If your application would be stronger with 1st semester senior year grades you could be potentially at a disadvantage.
My D took advantage of applying EA to any school that offered it. Bonus points to the safety that had rolling admission with EA so she had an acceptance in hand in October.
Note, I’m talking about non binding EA.
@1NJParent I think that you should have said that they were two examples. There are lots of private schools that have unrestricted EA. UChicago, Tulane, Fordham , etc.
These private schools you mentioned, and a few others (such as CWRU), also offer ED. Their EA programs are mostly in name only. They’re offered to mainly increase the number of applicants (to make the schools appear more selective). Very few applicants are accepted under their EA programs. I wouldn’t consider them to be fair and genuine EA programs.
Deleted, as I basically repeated what Eeyore wrote.
Another advantage is showing the college that you are really serious about them. You’ll also have more opportunities to stand out because there’s a smaller pool of applicants, but they will all be part of the high rigor group.
Villanova has a true EA program. Doesn’t U Miami too?
My understanding was that Tulane takes a lot of people EA as well as ED. From what I recall Fordham is not too shy about EA admits either. I don’t know about the others that offer both EA and ED, other than understanding that Chicago EA is extremely difficult.
Ok, so my GPA won’t go up next yr because I have a 98% total average (highest in my grade) and the 4.0 is a 97%-100%.
Also, I’d like to add that in my junior year, I took several senior courses and self-studied them and I took their APs and finals. I don’t think my exams will impose much of a problem because in 10th grade I took 5 external exams (5 IGCSE exams) and in 11th grade, I took 11 external exams (4APs, 2 AS/A level, 5 IGCSEs).
I think my biggest issue is that I’m transferring schools when all my finals are over (I have no choice since my father lost his job) and thus I have no secured position in their volleyball team, yet.
I have a couple of extracurriculars but they are all interconnected, the focus of all of them is one thing. I didn’t think that forcing myself to do too many was a good idea because I wouldn’t do them with passion and it would be for show. I saw it that way: If I did many extracurriculars I didn’t like doing, it would drain me and it wouldn’t reflect my passions and what I genuinely value as a person. At the moment, I have a big project going on. The reason I started it is the same reason I did all these extracurriculars through highschool (Its something my best friend and I started ourselves with no external aid, whatsoever).
My extracurriculars aren’t many and are concentrated around one thing but, I thoroughly enjoy them all.
Will my lack of diversity and the small number of extracurriculars impede my application? Because if that is the case, I’ll have to diversify in my senior year and I’ll miss the EA.
Do I go for the EA?
(Also schools are going to start early this year, so I might make it to the team before EA.)
If you have strong grades I see no reason not to apply EA.
Just be very clear that the schools on your list have non binding EA and not restricted early decision (it can be called different things at different schools). Any school with a binding early decision means you are committed to attending that one school and you can generally only apply to one.
If you need financial aid, you don’t want to apply binding ED so you can compare offers.
To clarify, EA means early action, not early admission. There isn’t an actual process called early admission, to my knowledge.
There’re only a few reasons not to apply for early admission. For ED, as @momofsenior1 has indicated, finance is the main deterrent. Another reason for not applying ED is that you don’t have a first-choice school before Nov 1, or your first-choice school doesn’t offer ED. The only other reason not to apply EA or ED is that your application isn’t in as good a shape as it could be by Nov 1 and you need the extra two months to improve it. Also keep in mind that some schools may eliminate their early admission programs this year following Princeton’s lead.
@Rod251 are you international?
@SJ2727 Yes I am
That makes a difference in admission likelihood too.