<p>"Forget facts and try logic: if it were easier for any individual applicant to get in RD rather than EA, why would knowledgable college counselors at the nation's top public and private schools invariably tell <em>all</em> applicants to apply early - <em>somewhere ... anywhere</em> to increase their odds of admission to an elite?"</p>
<p>Because at some, not all, elite colleges, EA really does confer an advantage.</p>
<p>This, however, is the Harvard board, and my experience has been that EA does not confer an advantage when it comes to Harvard. This is based on what I have seen in my large (in miles) region that probably has fewer Harvard applicants than Byerly does in his region that is smaller in miles, but probably enormous when it comes to applicants and the competitiveness of the applicants.</p>
<p>I a can imagine that for a few locations, such as Byerly's, EA may confer an advantage when applying to Harvard. This could be the case because his region has lots of outstanding students who are so rabid about getting into a top college that probably lots of students are doing things like applying to all of the Ivies, and sending out 20 applications.</p>
<p>Consequently, for a region like that -- which is atypical when it comes to the country -- it may be that EA confers an advantage because when selecting among a large group of amazingly outsanding applicants, adcoms want to pick students who really do want to come to Harvard.</p>
<p>My area, however, is more reflective of the rest of the country (when you take out of the equation places like NYC, Boston and D.C.). We don't have Intel finalists, RSI participants, or prodigy musicians who played solo concerts at Carnegie Hall. Most of our applicants will end up at our flagship state U. For most, the best school that they probably could get into would be an Emory or Notre Dame. </p>
<p>Our EA pool tends to contain our students who are the strongest: the 1500+ scorers, NM finalists, students who have won national or state awards for something individual. Overall, our EA pool is stronger than is our RD pool. It's also smaller than is our RD pool. Typically one student is accepted EA and one is accepted RD. Both students tend to be equivalent in terms of the strength of their applications. Sometimes the RD accept had been deferred EA, but that's not always the case.</p>
<p>I have seen strong students who didn't apply EA not get in RD. I don't think that's because they didn't bother applying EA. I think that what happens is that by the time they were interviewed by H, their interview was unremarkable because they were burned out on interviewing or already had an EA decision in hand that they were planning on accepting.</p>
<p>It also might be that if they had an EA accept from an excellent college, their GC recommends more strongly students who are applying to Harvard but don't have an EA accept from a top college.</p>