I spoke to the admissions counselor about this when my D20 received the e-mail pushing her to apply to ED2 (instead of RD). I explained that I knew (based on our EFC) that we would not receive any financial aid, but that I would need some idea of merit aid before we could commit. Unfortunately, I’ve found the NPCs very inaccurate for all of the schools my daughter has applied to. Maybe they’re accurate for financial aid, but they all said we’d be paying full price, and that’s not the case at all for the EA offers we’ve received so far. Anyway, the AU counselor recommended not applying ED if we wanted to compare merit aid offers. They won’t share the requirements for their different levels of merit aid, and apparently they change yearly. I wish they would just be transparent about it.
@izrk02 Well that’s my point. It’s more hearsay from forums and discussion boards. It’s not coming from the colleges itself.
@DC2009 I literally posted a quote from an admission counselor on the subject, is that not coming from the college itself? And of course colleges aren’t going to broadcast the information, that would be suicide. But just because its on a forum, doesn’t mean its not true just because you don’t want it to be.
Original poster, did your daughter get in?
My daughter got waitlisted with pretty high stats (34 ACT, 3.97 UWGPA, 5.24 SCW GPA, 11 AP’s and lots of extracurricular and volunteering) and I believe the showing interest played a HUGE role into this. We did not visit because we thought we would wait until admitted. I wish I had read this beforehand 
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American was not a safety for her (it was one of our in-state schools), she really did like the idea of going there but she unfortunately did not take the whole application process quite as serious as she should have.
@upstatemom
You can always appeal an admissions decision. If she is set that AU is the one, no harm in trying!
Are decisions out? We heard today is the day .
Yes