<p>Time Magazine:
When Early College Admissions Go Extreme
Despite Harvard’s decision to stop early admissions, more students are applying for college earlier and earlier. And that has educators more and more concerned</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1534476,00.html?cnn=yes[/url]”>http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1534476,00.html?cnn=yes</a></p>
<p>Early decision provided my son the chance to get into a school that might not have accepted him via regular decision. It also put an early end to a stressful application process, allowing him to enjoy Christmas vacation. It’s definitely not all bad.</p>
<p>sigh… another reporter writing about college admissions who doesn’t know what “yield” means.</p>
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<p>Actually that sentence is pretty funny on several levels… YIELD for ED approaches 100%, but gee, I thought admitted students during the ED round tended to have lower average stats than the RD round… hmmmmmm</p>
<p>And what is wrong with a rolling admissions school accepting applications as soon as a student completes their junior year in HS?</p>
<p>NJres:</p>
<p>Apart from the reporter’s misuse of “yield”, I think it’s axiomatic for ED schools that (a) the average stats (and other quality measures) of the ED applicant pool are significantly better than those of the RD pool, but (b) the average stats of students admitted ED may be worse than those of students admitted RD, because (c) the acceptance or admission rate of ED students is higher. </p>
<p>That’s not illogical at all. Suppose a school rates all applicants on a 10-point scale, and accepts 5 ED and 25 RD applicants on the basis of rating (with ties broken by lottery) to get a class of 20. It gets 10 ED applications: 2 10s, 2 9s, 3 8s, 2 7s, 1 6, so the average is 8.2. It admits 5 (50%) students, with an average rating of 9.2, and defers the remaining 8s to the regular round. In the regular round, it has 100 new applicants and the 2 deferred: 12 10s, 12 9s, 23 8s, 30 7s, 20 6s, 5 5s, for an average of 7.7 among the new applicants. It accepts 25 students (25%), with an average of 9.4. The ED pool is better, but the ED acceptees have lower average stats, because the one (out of two overall) “8” admitted at the ED stage represented a greater portion of the ED admittee pool.</p>
<p>People will look at the overall stats, and say the ED kids were advantaged because they had almost twice the chance of being accepted than the RD kids – 50% vs. 25.5% (and really it’s 55% vs. 25%, taking into account the deferrals). If the ED kids are richer, that looks unfair. And, if you could accurately identify the “8s”, the difference is even more striking – the ED 8s were eight times more likely to be accepted, a 36% chance vs. a 4.3% chance. But for 78% of the applicants (84/110), ED or RD made no difference at all. All the 10s and 9s were going to get in, and none of the 7s or below. ED makes a difference for exactly 5% of the admitted class.</p>
<p>And the wealth effect of having ED overall is pretty minor. Assume (a) each of the ED applicants has wealth of $200, and each of the RD applicants has wealth of $100, and (b) the same kids would have applied, and the same yield achieved from the same kids, without ED. With ED, the expected average wealth of the admitted class is $125.26; without ED, it would be $118.75. That’s a whopping 5.5% difference, on pretty extreme assumptions about the wealth difference in the pools. </p>
<p>Now, look what happens if I change the (somewhat over-optimistic) yield assumption, and assume instead that without ED the college would have to admit 33 applicants (i.e., 3 more) to get a class of 20, and that the same kids wouldn’t necessarily enroll without ED. Then, the average rating of the accepted group would go down from 9.4 to 9.27, the average rating for the enrolled class would go down from 9.38 to 8.7, and the average wealth would go down to $112.88. </p>
<p>So the college might reasonably believe it faces the following tradeoff: By eliminating ED, it could lower the average wealth of its class by 5-10%, at the risk of lowering its average rating by 0.7. I don’t know that is a compelling case to eliminate ED.</p>
<p>My illustration is simplified but not, I think, unrealistic. It suggests there is less to the whole ED tempest than may otherwise appear.</p>
<p>The biggest problem I see with ED is that it severely disadvantages those who need financial aid. For anyone else, I don’t see the problem. It all comes down to tradeoffs which is the way things just work in life. You make an upfront commitment to attend a school in exchange for an early answer and possible extra consideration. I don’t see any unfairness in the school granting some consideration for the commitiment. Yes, it can gamed, but there is a risk. I see kids give up a shot at a more selective school for a better chance at a slightly less selective one just to get this whole shooting match over fast. And, yes, there is often buyer’s remorse, Could I have gotten into Duke since I got into Wake Forest so easily, and Classsmate Jones got into Duke with less stellar stats? These are all tradeoffs we make. I think EA and rolling admissions is great, in that it gets these danged apps off the table sooner and relieves the stress, letting the kid and family to get on with the senior year. If some bonuses come up in April, fine. At least you’re not biting nails all years wondering if your kid will get in somewhere he likes. If the counselors were on the ball they would push these kids to get the apps out early and be done with it. More time to resolve issues and problems asa they arise.
The only time I would advise anyone to hold off in sending off any apps early is if they feel they can strengthen their case with senior year marks. Even if you are unsure where to apply, a few general early apps can jumpstart your process.</p>
<p>The families on CC are savvy and their kids start exploring colleges in junior year and many are then ready to narrow it down even to a first choice by Nov. 1 of senior year. </p>
<p>But you’d be surprised at how late so many families start this process. I have had clients BEGIN the college selection process around Thanksgiving of senior year in HS and they are NOT low income families! Less extreme, but I have many seniors going through my suggestions of colleges and coming up with a list in early fall. Many just began the process. I think the rest of us, or at least speaking for myself, had their kids start in junior year. Then there is the opposite end of the spectrum where people are planning the college list in ninth grade (or in K!).</p>
<p>It has been my experience that those families who are planning the college list as early as 9th grade (or in K or at birth!), are those who are setting their hats for a highly selective college or a specific college. So much can change in those several years, so it is not wise to get too set on those schools and to keep an open mind. But college counselors these days are saying that if you want a shot at HPY, freshman year in highschool is not too early, especially if you not knowledgeable about what is required to get into the very top schools.<br>
Yes, many kids and families do not start thinking about college until the letters from the gc start coming home with an urgent tone, or when it becomes clear that everyone else has gotten their apps done. If these families are in schools where the environment has been supportive for college apps, well, that is their privilege to take their time. It is a whole different story for those in schools that are disadvantaged and the guidance office is deluged with more pressing issues than getting kids into college. Those kids have a challenge from the onset, and timing is just one of the many disadvantages they may have without some outside intervention.</p>
<p>I forgot to say that I had a client this summer, a rising senior, whose mom even teaches at our school, who had yet to take the SATs. She is not the only kid I have had like this. I had one last year who hadn’t taken it until Nov. of senior year and he was not from an underprivileged family (considering how much they had to pay for the counseling package). It is very hard for me to even select schools and rate their chances without that important piece in hand. Trust me, so many families out there are not like here on CC! :D</p>
<p>Sooz: Be careful of posts that risk identifying another person, as your last one does. You might consider editing it.</p>
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<p>No doubt true, but that problem is not caused by EA or ED. If families don’t start planning ahead, how will eliminating, particularly non-binding EA, help them? Doesn’t it just penalize the families that do plan ahead?</p>
<p>You’re right, soozie, you’re so right. Plenty of parents at our wealthy prep school similarly lagged behind. It’s amazing to me to see how many educated parents just assume that it will just “happen.” (by itself, presumably – not unlike spontaneous combustion).</p>
<p>JHS, I’ve been saying similar things for a long time about the minuscule differences between ED and RD – given all factors, including total applicant pool, percent accepted from each round, etc. And as to the myth of the “lower stats,” again – unless such lower-stat students have unique or more extreme hooks than their competitors – it generally does not pay (statistics show this) to apply ED to a very competitive school such as HYP, with a slightly sub-par GPA/SAT. It is a very different story for other schools, because those schools are competing with the HYP’s for yield, AND for money. In the latter cases, your slightly sub-par profile may indeed give you the boost in that early round.</p>
<p>For HYP, every single student that I know of (from a variety of schools) who was admitted EA or ED was better qualified academically than competitors from the same school. When it came to hooks for those students, the ones admitted were still the ones with better academic qualifications, even when in some cases the slightly less (but nearly as) qualified student had a more powerful hook.</p>
<p>Families do not go to college; individual students do. But individual students need information from knowledgeable parents and GCs about issues such as taking SATs, etc… It is not at all unreasonable for students to think that focusing on colleges is something that should be done in senior year, not sophomore or senior. It takes clued-in adults to tell them otherwise. </p>
<p>And no, it does not mean that the kids are dumb and underserving of attending HYP. Nor does eliminating EA/ED “penalize” families or students. It just eliminates the advantage they used to have.</p>
<p>I agree with you, Chedva.</p>
<p>I really don’t think this is so much about planning ahead vs. not, but about financial aid information. For our family, financial aid HAD to be a consideration. So ED just wasn’t an option. There are many families like ours. </p>
<p>If there is an advantage to applying ED to some selective institutions, that fact negatively impacts students from less wealthy families.</p>
<p>Note: many of these same institutions assert that their admissions process is “need blind.”</p>
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<p>Absolutely true - financial aid is often a consideration, and that clearly does have an effect on less wealthy families. However, since EA is non-binding, and you can wait for all acceptances and financial aid packages to come in before deciding where to enroll, how does eliminating EA change the equation at all?</p>
<p>I agree that EA doesn’t affect weighing financial aid packages because it is non binding. </p>
<p>What I was talking about earlier wasn’t so much applying early or not but how there are MANY families who start the process on what I think of as the late side so there is no way to select one favorite school for early admissions. By the same token, some of these kids have a clear cut “first choice” even though they have not created a list yet, and haven’t visited any schools…I have work with many students where that is also the scenario.</p>
<p>I was speaking primarily to the issues surrounding ED.</p>
<p>However, and please correct me if my memory fails here, don’t some schools restrict the EA application to just one school? If there is still an advantage to applying EA and it happens that the school the applicant has chosen to apply to EA accepts him but does not award sufficient aid, there is still a built-in advantage to the students whose family is able to entirely fund his education, as he can accept any offer of admission that results from preferential treatment of EA applicants.</p>
<p>Mafool:</p>
<p>I don’t understand what advantage you see.</p>
<p>There are only three “single choice early action” schools, as far as I know, although they occupy a lot of our attention: Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. If you apply EA to one of them, you can’t apply EA or ED anywhere else, although you can submit as many RD applications as you want, including rolling admission RD applications. If a kid that needs financial aid gets accepted EA at one of those three schools, presumably he will also be accepted at some other schools RD, and will be able to compare financial aid packages (and maybe negotiate). For some families, those schools are likely to have the best packages, since they (Harvard and Yale, at least) essentially define EFC as $0 for families with less than $60,000 income, and don’t require loans. </p>
<p>So, yes, if a rich kid gets into Harvard EA, and he’s happy with that, then he’s stress-free, while an unrich kid may have to apply to other schools to see what financial aid offers he gets. That may not be fair or nice, but it’s not an admission advantage.</p>
<p>The discussion between Mafool and JHS illustrates why Harvard thinks it might be better to scrape SCEA.</p>
<p>As I said, I was speaking primarily of ED programs. </p>
<p>I’ll grant that the single-choice EA programs aren’t the problem for less wealthy students that the ED programs may be. But I do think that the wealthy student has a slight advantage, because, if admitted as a result of a preference for EA applications, he can attend. IOW he can benefit from the EA program if admitted and the less wealthy student cannot necessarily benefit from the same program.</p>
<p>Maybe this is splitting hairs.</p>