Will early decision (ED) give you better chances compared to restrictive early action (REA)?

Data10
Wed, 22 Jul 2020 02:58:43 +0000

skieurope:

The acceptance rates for REA are higher, but Harvard has gone on record as saying that they will not accept and applicant REA that they would have rejected RD. Plus when you take the athletic recruits and legacies out of the REA numbers, the acceptance rate drops.

In the lawsuit multi-year sample, the acceptance rates were as follows. I am only considering years for which REA was offered:

Overall Admit Rate
REA: 23.6% accepted
RD: 3.6% accepted

The ALDC hooked kids are overrepresented among REA applicants, while URM hooks and low SES preference are overrepresented among RD applicants. If I exclude all the ALDC hook kids that favor REA applicants, which includes legacies and athletes, then the admit rate becomes:

Non-ALDC Hook Admit Rate
REA: 14.5% accepted
RD: 3.2% accepted

The REA admit rate was 4.5x larger for non-ALDC kids. It’s possible that the REA applicant pool of unhooked kids was just stronger. The internal analysis found that in 2016, 50% of early applicants had high academic 1-2 rating compared to 38% of RD applicants, suggesting that there is indeed a larger portion of high stat kid in the REA sample. Although the specific percentages will change when you exclude ALDC hooks, and the decreased portion of applicants with URM and./or low SES preference in REA will also have an impact. There are many variables that need to be considered.

One of the lawsuit analyses did a regression that controlled for all of these variables – ALDC hook status, URM hook status, all of the available ratings including academic, and many other factors. Among kids with similar hook status and similar ratings, the lawsuit analysis suggests a 4.6x odds ratio advantage for applying early. This suggests applying early is not as strong as an ALDC hook, but is a significant advantage.

The standard error of this applying early advantage was far smaller than most ALDC hooks, suggesting that applying early may be a more consistently applied advantage than other types of hooks (larger sample size is also important). For example, the analysis suggests that the apparent REA advantage for similarly applicants (similar hook status, similar reader ratings) has a ~1 in 100 quindecillion chance of happening randomly (1 in 10^50) compared to a 1 in ~3 million chance for apparent admission advantage for kids on the Dean/Director’s special interest list to happen randomly. The Dean/Director’s special interest list appears to be a stronger boost on average, but the degree of that boost seems has more variation, and there is a smaller sample. As such, the analysis suggests we can be far more confident that applying REA is an admissions advantage than we can for being on the Dean/Director’s special interest list.

Suffice to say, I think the Harvard quotes about REA not offering an advantage are misleading. They may mean something like they aren’t admitting unqualified applicants who would not make it past the first round, and the preferences more relate to later rounds with more subjective factors. This type of misleading statement about whether applying early offers an advantage is common at other colleges besides Harvard. For example, in another recent thread about whether ED offered an advantage at Tufts, someone linked the Tufts post at https://admissions.tufts.edu/blogs/inside-admissions/post/is-it-easier-to-get-in-ed-2/ in which the Tufts admission director stated:

It is NOT (I repeat NOT) easier to get into Tufts ED. But sometimes it’s harder to get in Regular Decision. Let me explain.