@JHS As it happens the kid in the example I gave was not a rich kid - he talks about his modest background here on one of the cc threads. He also talks about the deficits in his education because of being from a rural school. That didn’t prevent him from applying ED to Chicago. The point I was making was that the analysis in his own mind was over whether he was really suited to the more intellectually ambitious Chicago style of education as against what he felt he was more suited to - a college with a preprofessional tone. To me that seems like a reasonable thought process dictated by real questions about self and schools. You are generalizing rather one-dimensionally, I think, about socioeconomic privilege in relation to ED. Were EA applicants of the past really very different in socioeconomic status from ED applicants of the present?
@JHS None of the kids I mentioned applied more than one school early. They however are free to apply any other schools during RD. You never heard doesn’t necessarily mean it does not happen. My kid’s school counselor also specifically told us the parent that if anybody tell us their kids received full ride scholarship, please do not believe it. no school offers full ride scholarship… I’m not trying to convince anybody so this is my last post
@marlowe1 : I am generalizing because the statistics, at least as of a few years ago, almost demand generalization. Of course that does not mean that every single ED applicant is wealthy. Just that, as a population, relatively, they are, and the inequality has gotten worse over time. (There are scholarship students at prep schools, too. I’m sure lots of them apply ED, like their classmates. And I’m certain there are poor kids not at prep schools who figure things out and apply ED, too. But not very many of them.)
If you are reading CC posts, you ought to acknowledge and address the dozens, scores, hundreds perhaps of posts saying some version of “in my family we really need to get the best financial deal, so ED is out of the question.” In fact, EA, which shouldn’t be problematic at all, turns out to favor wealthier applicants, too, because one has to be pretty sophisticated to understand the difference between EA and ED. Lots of people simply assume they are the same.
One more thing: I agree completely that the applicant you described made a thoughtful, mature, substantive decision. But wait! Somehow, that thoughtful, mature, substantive kid managed to miss all those issues one month before, when he applied to the University of Chicago ED. If those thoughts had occurred to him one month later, he would have been just another ED applicant, maybe even one of those accepted ED supposedly to preserve the special quality of Chicago.
The fact that one ED applicant woke up one morning and realized he wasn’t a perfect fit with Chicago and converted his application to EA (with, essentially, a negative result) – that hardly assures me that the rest of the EA pool consists of true believers. There are a bunch of true believers there, sure, but it’s a mixed bag, and there are true believers in the EA and RD pools, too.
“In fact, EA, which shouldn’t be problematic at all, turns out to favor wealthier applicants, too, because one has to be pretty sophisticated to understand the difference between EA and ED. Lots of people simply assume they are the same.”
If they read the school’s website they’d quickly understand the school’s early admissions policy. There’s no excuse for not doing so and in a tech-savy world it would seem odd that they aren’t. Wonder if there is something else going on. Perhaps wealthier families are more strategic or do more research into schools at an early stage so are more prepared to apply early? College admissions is a process that definitely rewards the clever but it shouldn’t serve as an intelligence test to weed out those who can’t read the instructions! Skeptical that this is what’s actually going on.
"If you are reading CC posts, you ought to acknowledge and address the dozens, scores, hundreds perhaps of posts saying some version of “in my family we really need to get the best financial deal, so ED is out of the question.” "
There are many such posts. The thing is, families have all sorts of reasons for that need and not all have to do with having little in the way of financial means. Price-sensitivity will happen as much due to different priorities as it does different means. We are consumers of education in our family - that’s just the way we are. But we know families from multiple times our wealth to a fraction thereof who simply consider paying a “lot” of money for a liberal arts education to be a waste. They spend their money differently than we do. (They have nicer vacations as well!). They also consider a college education to be pretty much the same across the spectrum of schools. This is merely one or two examples of how families might distinctly view a college education.
There are obviously plenty of legitimate reasons to avoid ED. There’s no one right answer here and all families make decisions that work for their particular circumstances and choice-sets. Many colleges do much to accommodate families but they have their own concerns and objectives which may not mesh with a whole bunch of families. That can be annoying when it’s a school you really would love to attend.
@JHS , I do see lots of general irritation against ED on this board. Some but not so much of it is based on the particular financial circumstances of potential applicants (at least on the Chicago board, which is the only one I ever look at). Those parents need to dig a little more deeply into the whole financial aid set-up at Chicago. Or perhaps the University needs to trumpet more loudly in all those glossy mailings just how that part of the system works. The published sticker costs of an education at Chicago or any other private school are daunting, certainly. That’s an emotional hurdle the superwealthy don’t have to get over, agreed. Middling or lower income families will have to make an attempt to understand what lies below those published figures. This probably screens some of them out. Some may not be willing to do the work of understanding or won’t believe what they are being told. That natural barrier needs to be combatted by clear and emphatic information and by attestations from people, like @JBStillFlying ,who’ve been through the wars.
There are perhaps others who are simply set on making the best deal they can at the best university on offer. They would much prefer an all-RD system at all schools, permitting them to send out multiple arrows in all directions without commitment or limitation. I understand that thinking but am not sympathetic to it.
I’m not so sure that at Chicago the introduction of ED is having that large an effect on the demographics of the student-body. Statistics from prior years for other schools should be regarded with caution. It seems reasonable to think that with greater familiarity and the ever-enlarging size of the ED pool, coupled with the undoubted boost that ED gives an applicant, the base will broaden. But suppose that Chicago went back to an EA-exclusive regime: You appear to be acknowledging that EA applicants are not very different from ED applicants demographically, and I don’t believe you are advocating abandoning EA. So all that would have been achieved is the depriving of the admissions people of a very crucial bit of knowledge about certain applicants - that they have Chicago as their first choice. Granted that a first-choice of Chicago can be made for the wrong reasons, or without proper knowledge or consideration of other possibilities. But a choice of school has to be made at some point. Unless I am misremembering my own youth (certainly possible) I was highly roused and motivated to make this particular choice as I entered senior year. It doesn’t seem too soon to me. What would have been heartbreaking would have been entering a pool of 30,000 applicants without any way of really and truly demonstrating my commitment to Chicago and thus differentiating me from all those who have simply shot arrows in the air.