Am I better off applying EA to Harvard or Stanford?

[barbecuesauce]

I have good grades (GPA just over 4), and a good variety of ECs. I took the SAT this year and scored a 1590. Stanford would be my first choice school, but I’ve heard that applying Early Action there gives one roughly the same odds as Regular Decision. I’ve read that Harvard, on the other hand, admits 15% of early applicants vs. just 5% of regular applicants. I really liked Harvard when I toured there, and it’s not far behind Stanford as my second choice. Does Stanford really not accept more Early Applicants, and if so, am I better off applying early to Harvard instead?

[Emsmom1]

What is your unweighted and weighted GPA? You said just over 4- I assume that’s weighted?

[inevitablewinner]

Hello,

This is actually a very common misconception that has been debunked by research multiple times.

For schools, like Harvard and Stanford, there isn’t really a difference between applying early and regular in terms of chances of admission. Even if acceptance rates are higher for students who apply early, application pools are typically more competitive, so it doesn’t matter.

I would recommend applying early to whichever school you like more. That way you find out sooner whether you get admitted. Then, if you would like, you can apply to other school regular.

[lookingforward]

Don’t apply until you know what matters besides stats and some ECs. They don’t just collect kids who meet a gpa threshold and randomly pick a percentage of those.

Getting admitted is less about what you want and all about what they want.

[BKSquared]

@inevitablewinner is correct. There is really not an advantage to applying EA for Stanford or Harvard. Harvard’s website even explicitly says so,

“Harvard does not offer an advantage to students who apply early. Higher Early Action acceptance rates reflect the remarkable strength of Early Action pools. For any individual student, the final decision will be the same whether the student applies Early Action or Regular Decision.”

In addition to the stronger pool, the EA admit rate is also skewed by all the athletic recruits and special super hooks that apply early. However, some have speculated that legacies with strong app’s may be better off applying early to get ahead of other legacies who apply RD.

The big difference is that Harvard tends to defer many candidates (over 70%), Stanford much less so. You will therefore most likely not be in limbo with respect to Stanford after their early action announcement date. For Harvard, if you fall into the larger deferral pool, maybe there is something you can add to your app during the RD assessment period.

To apply early to either school, your application needs to be totally buttoned up. Does your GPA put you in the top 2/3% of your class? Remember both schools are SCEA. My son had gotten into our state flagship (which is one of the better ones in the country) under rolling admissions and indications were he’d get into one of the honors programs, so he went for Yale SCEA with a good college option already secured. Will you have a decent alterative already in the bag by Nov 1?

To me, the EA tool is not one that provides you an admissions advantage. Where it is really useful is in reducing the number of schools you need to apply RD, and maybe giving you some more information on how strong your application really is. In terms of culling choices/reducing some level of senior stress, you might consider applying EA to a program(s) at a low reach, high match, especially if your state flagship (or another decent choice with rolling admissions) is not an option. If you get accepted, you can throw out all the schools that you have ranked below that one. If you are rejected, or even deferred, it may indicate some weakness in your app. It may be your essays or LoR’s, which are things you can change. It may also temper your expectations as far as what are your true prospects. If you are deferred by Harvard (or rejected by Stanford), both likely scenarios, you really don’t have much additional information to use to assess where you should apply RD. Of course if you get in either one, senior year will be zero stress, and you will save your parents a boatload of application and test report fees.

Good luck.

[badgolfer]

@inevitablewinner writes: This is actually a very common misconception that has been debunked by research multiple times.

Where is that research? Links? I hope you’re not talking about the blurb every college puts on its admission page that says chances are equal, but bona fide research.

There are studies showing that in fact early applicants do get a significant advantage.

At Harvard University, which had the lowest acceptance rate in the Ivy League, just 3.4 percent of students applying for regular admission to the Class of 2020 were admitted, compared to 14.9 percent of those applying early.

A study published by Harvard University Press estimated that students applying for early admission receive the equivalent of a 100-point bonus on the SAT – an enormous advantage.
https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2017/01/12/discrimination-inherent-early-admissions-programs-essay

The article continues with a quote from the former head of Harvard, someone who ought to have known if their program didn’t make a difference in admission

Derek Bok, who was president of Harvard in 2006 when early admissions were dropped, justified the move in words that are as true today as they were 10 years ago. “Early-admission programs tend to advantage the advantaged,” Bok said. “Students from more sophisticated backgrounds and affluent high schools often apply early to increase their chances of admission, while minority students and students from rural areas, other countries and high schools with fewer resources miss out.

Here is a research study done at Stanford

The results from various specifications are reported in Table 4. We control for application characteristics including the student’s SAT scores, demographic, and other student variables, and characteristics of the student’s high school. Applying early is associated with a substantial increase in acceptance probability conditional on application characteristics. The estimated effect is similar across specifications and larger for early decision than early action. An early action application is associated with a 17 to 20 percentage point increase in admission probability, and an early decision application with a 31 to 37 percentage point increase.
https://www.stanford.edu/~jdlevin/Papers/EarlyAdmissions.pdf

There is a study done by the Washington Post

The Washington Post analyzed admission data for 2015 from 64 prominent colleges and universities. It found that admission rates for students who apply through binding “early decision,” are significantly higher than total admission rates. It also found that early decision fills a large share of the class at many schools.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/apps/g/page/local/college-admissions-the-early-decision-advantage/2004/

And there was the Atlantic article about 15 years ago that spearheaded interest in the topic

A counselor at a private school that has long sent many of its graduates to Penn showed me a list of the students from that school who had applied to Penn last year. The students were listed in order of their high school grade-point average—usually the strongest single factor in college admissions—with indications of whether they had applied early or regular and whether they had been accepted or not. Some students far down in the class who applied early were accepted; some students thirty or forty places above them in class rank who applied regular were denied. The counselor did not stop to calculate exactly how much an early decision was “worth” in terms of grade-point average, but it clearly made a difference.

Last fall Christopher Avery, of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and several colleagues produced smoking-gun evidence that they do. The authors analyzed five years’ worth of admissions records from fourteen selective colleges, involving a total of 500,000 applications, and interviewed 400 college students, sixty high school seniors, and thirty-five counselors. They found that at the ED schools an early application was worth as much in the competition for admission as scoring 100 extra points on the SAT. The Avery study’s findings were the more striking because what admissions officers refer to as “hooked” applicants were excluded from the study. These are students given special consideration, and therefore likely to be admitted despite lower scores, because of “legacy” factors (alumni parents or other relatives, plus past or potential donations from the family), specific athletic recruiting, or affirmative action.
The Early-Decision Racket - The Atlantic

[lookingforward]

^As we often remind posters, big difference between causation and correlation. And what Bok said, 11 years ago, can’t account for changes in the interim. Same for a 15 year old article.

No one, advantaged or not, does himself any good applying early to a school he doesn’t know.

If OP were researching H, he would have found BKSquared’s quote. Easily. And more that would help him prepare his app.

Don’t apply blind.

[Penn95]

@barbecuesauce when you account for legacies and athletes at Harvard (who are pretty much exclusively admitted during SCEA), the bump at Harvard is not significant. Definitely not significant enough to use your early application solely based on that. Since Stanford is your first choice I would go with Stanford SCEA.

[billcsho]

Forget about the admission rates, check out which one you like more. Your chance would not be very different between the two anyway unless you have legacy.