<p>I saw a school where the stats are drastically different from EA to RD. Is that common?</p>
<p>It appears to be a very real trend, at least at the schools my kids have been interested in. Really, there’s not a lot of good reasons to NOT apply EA to most schools, as EA is non-binding. The schools that are taking higher and higher percentages of ED students is more troublesome, as ED doesn’t give you a chance to compare financial packages across schools.</p>
<p>Compare these numbers to the overall acceptance rates from the CDS:</p>
<p><a href=“Early Admissions Statistics 2013 - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com”>Early Admissions Statistics 2013 - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com;
<p>(Note: the top box are ED schools, the lower tow are EA).</p>
<p>For your question, if it is for a specific school, it may or may not. As many top schools have ED that has a limit on one. So many qualified students cannot apply early to all schools they want.
If you change the question as “Do most students applied early has higher qualification?”, the answer is very likely (except for some recruit).</p>
<p>The early applications may also have recruited athletes and the like.</p>
<p>The colleges probably won’t be very forthcoming about how much of a difference applying in the early round makes. They do want you to believe that it is advantageous, and it probably is in many cases. So they just publish the acceptance rates with no context of the strength of the applicant pool.</p>
<p>It may be that the most qualified students also tend to be the most savvy about the college application process, and thus are aware of the benefits of applying early.</p>
<p>The early applicants also have achieved their target scores and GPA early on. Some of the RD students are still trying to retake SAT/ACT or bring up the GPA until they are running out of time.</p>