<p>or is it just for people who want to find out early? thanks</p>
<p>It made a huge difference this year as around I think 27% of Ea got in as opposed to only 12 % of RD. Although this year was a little different than previous due to 42% rise in applications. If you really want to go to Chicago I would definitely work on your essays over the summer and apply Ea.</p>
<p>I applied EA and got in. Possibly wouldn’t have if applied RD. :)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The EA pool is more self-selecting.</p>
<p>One of the things that’s “self-selecting” about the EA pool is that it doesn’t have anyone in it who’s applying SCEA to Stanford or Yale or ED to Brown. If I were guessing, I would guess that at least 2,000-3,000 very strong RD applications – and maybe even more than that – come from those sub-pools who couldn’t apply EA. That’s why I have always been skeptical that at Chicago the EA pool was stronger than the RD pool. And of course the admissions rates have never differed as much as they did this year before.</p>
<p>This year, I think one or both of two things happened:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Nondorf & Co. deliberately admitted a higher percentage of EA students to maintain yield and to create an EA frenzy next year. </p></li>
<li><p>They misestimated how huge the RD increase was going to be, and didn’t adjust appropriately.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Really, I’m only talking about a delta of 200-300 EA admissions. Recently, they had been admitting 1,300-1,400; this year it was 1,650. I don’t understand what good explanation there could possibly have been for admitting the extra students EA on December 15 when they must have had plenty of indications by then that a tsunami of RD applications was coming. (As opposed to last year, when EA applications went way up but then RD applications were almost flat.)</p>