<p>I've heard that EA is actually, in general, more competitive at most schools....?</p>
<p>ED generally has a higher acceptance rate than RD or EA because it’s binding and the applicant pool is full extremely qualified and competitive students. EA is non-bindind and tends to have a lower acceptance rate because of that; it’s harder to get in EA as well because since the acceptance rate is low they tend to choose only the most qualified applicants.
(This is just based off my personal research, sorry if I have any wrong information.)</p>
<p>ED gives you a boost, EA doesn’t really. EA isn’t binding, so schools have no reason to accept more students during EA. It’s just a way to get your decision earlier.</p>
<p>Ea gives a slight boost as all seats are still open at a college and by applying early you are showing prompt interest in the college…Ed is the ultimate boost though but a binding agreement is undesirable. I would only apply Ed if it was the only school you could see yourself going to. Think it through before going Ed anywhere</p>
<p>^ same as everyone above</p>
<p>
It depends on the school. Ask the school about its acceptance rates between EA and RD. You can ask other schools about the rates for ED and RD (I don’t know of any schools off-hand that have EA and ED).</p>
<p>This is just my two cents here so take it for what it’s worth …</p>
<p>It is my humble personal opinion that a lot of HS students (and parents?) are looking at ED in the wrong way. It is apparent (from O/P and others) that students are seeing ED as an “application chance boost” instead of as a mechanism for applying to a clear-cut first choice qualified school (“qualified” meaning both academically and financially).</p>
<p>If the above conditions fit, go for it. If applying ED just so happens to give one’s application a statically better chance, great! But don’t look at it the other way around (“ED gives me a better chance, therefore I’ll apply.”)</p>
<p>You only get one chance at ED. If a person is thinking or asking about any other factors other than what I’ve described, then it is probably not the way to go for that particular school.</p>
<p>(Note: None of what I said applies to athletic recruits or other special circumstances.)</p>
<p>As always, YMMV.</p>
<p>Well stated, GolfFather.</p>
<p>Unlike ED, EA may or may not give any student an advantage in acceptance. If it is REA or SCEA that you cannot do ED/EA at least for other private schools, it may give you a small boost as they know the yield would be much higher than RD even it is not binding. For other EA, since you can apply to other schools ED/EA, they are not expecting any higher yield. In addition, many schools also have the merit aid available only to EA applicants leading to a pool of higher quality applicants in EA. For that reason, the acceptance rate in EA may still be higher, but it is definitely not less competitive than RD. Nevertheless, one should do EA whenever possible unless you need to wait for first semester grades or retaking test scores. It will show your interest to the schools (not applying because you were rejected EA/ED from other schoools), you are a better prepared student, you will be eligible for more financial aids, and you may rest assure earlier and have a merry Christmas.</p>
<p>[Colleges</a> Where Applying Early Decision Helps - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/right-school/timeline/articles/2009/09/30/colleges-where-applying-early-decision-helps]Colleges”>http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/right-school/timeline/articles/2009/09/30/colleges-where-applying-early-decision-helps)</p>
<p>[Colleges</a> Where Applying Early Action Helps - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/applying/applying-101/articles/2009/09/30/colleges-where-applying-early-action-helps?s_cid=related-links:TOP]Colleges”>http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/applying/applying-101/articles/2009/09/30/colleges-where-applying-early-action-helps?s_cid=related-links:TOP)</p>
<p>At Yale you more than double your selection rate with REA, at Stanford nearly so. That’s more than a small boost. But some ED schools give no boost, same with EA. It’s all YMMV.</p>
<p>A higher acceptance rate in EA/ED does not suggest a lower admission stat. Also, many top school will keep a very small pool of deferral. EA/ED may simply mean early rejection too. So you better bring up your GPA/score if they are below admission average.</p>
<p>^^^^</p>
<p>E/D, (ha, ED, get it 
)</p>
<p>Not to beat a dead horse, but look at the very first sentence of the USNews article you linked:</p>
<p>“If you really, really know which college you have to attend … “</p>
<p>That is, exactly, the main point of my post.</p>
<p>And two, it is dangerous to follow the erroneous linkage that ED admittance rates are higher than RD, therefore I will have a proportionally better chance of getting in.</p>
<p>That is like saying (back in the day) that I would have had a better chance of playing in the NBA if I had had an afro and wore knee pads. :)</p>
<p>I don’t disagree with a thing you are saying Golffather. I’m not a proponent of ED (big proponent of open EA). I was just clarifying misconceptions. Applying ED or EA does have an impact on admission rates at some schools, but that impact varies considerably.</p>
<p>I have heard very few adcoms state that applicants gain an advantage by applying ED - Bucknell is one that comes to mind.</p>
<p>I have heard a great many state that applicants gain NO advantage by applying ED, including every highly selective university offering ED. The only exception to this is a rep from Penn who said a few years ago that legacies would have an advantage only if they applied ED - but even this is a small subset of the ED pool. The Penn rep then said that non-legacies received no boost from ED.</p>
<p>The admission rates are higher due to the ED pool being self-selected - recruited athletes, children of major donors, faculty children, etc.</p>
<p>Applicants are desperate to gain any advantage possible - refer to the hundreds or thousands of dollars spent on SAT prep. They cling to any hint of potential assistance in what has become an incredibly competitive environment. However, the following do not provide any admissions advantage (in fact they might hurt chances) at highly selective universities:</p>
<p>-attending summer programs on the college’s campus;
-submitting excessive numbers of LOR;
-submitting LOR from impressive sounding people who don’t know the applicant well;
-promising not to apply for Financial Aid;
-listing memberships in dozens of meaningless ECs;
-submitting overly lengthy resumes as attachments to the application;
-applying ED</p>
<p>The Duke rep that visited my daughter’s school highly encouraged ED and had a handout showing the ED acceptance rate vs. the RD acceptance rate. My daughter desperately wanted to apply ED, but we had to sit her down and explain that it just didn’t make sense for us, as we really needed to be able to compare financial aid offers from schools before committing to one school.</p>
<p>^^^^</p>
<p>The Duke rep is a salesman for Duke.
Think of it that way and it will help a lot.</p>
<p>Picture the rep as a car salesman and they said something along the same lines.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I head just the opposite from adcoms (when the correct question was asked). ED does in fact provide a boost to the unhooked, whether that be Columbia, Penn, Brown, Dartmouth, Duke, et al. And don’t forget, that some of the deferrees from ED are ultimately accepted in the RD round.</p>
<p>GolfFather’s post #7 is important and correct.</p>
<p>Stephen, think of this in economic terms. Think about incentives.</p>
<p>A college with an Early Decision program has an incentive to take an acceptable decision under Early Decision. They know that student, whom they like just fine, will enroll. That helps with the college’s yield (the percentage of accepted students who actually enroll), and by and large people tend to buy into the notion that yield is somehow an indicator of “prestige,” whatever that means, exactly. (I’m not saying that it should be an indicator, or that it’s a good indicator–just that lots of folks see it that way. The fact that a college seems so desirable to accepted students will, almost inevitably, make it more desirable to applicants.) The college could wait around and see whether there’s a student they like better in the regular decision pool, but even if there is, they have no guarantee that the more desirable student will actually enroll. So a college has some reason to take a “good enough” student from the ED pool, who’s a sure bet to enroll, rather than take their chances with a preferable student from the RD pool (if there even *is *a preferable student there).</p>
<p>A college with an Early Action program doesn’t get the same certainty. They’ve offered a space to an EA applicant, but they won’t know until May 1 whether that student is going to enroll. They’ve used up one of the however-many admissions offers they planned to make that year, so they don’t have it available to them in the RD pool, but they don’t know whether they’re going to get a student they want (or a higher yield) out of the deal. This college’s best course of action is probably to defer “good enough” students to the RD round, and only to accept the EA students that they really, really want.</p>
<p>Lots of things can have some effect on this general principle (e.g., Columbia is less probably likely to lose students to someplace more “prestigious” than Elmira College is–no disrespect toward Elmira intended), but IMO this is a very broad-brush explanation of why ED is more likely to confer an admissions bump than EA is.</p>
<p>^^^^</p>
<p>As always, well put.</p>
<p>Sikorsky, I like and generally agree with the reasoning. I’m still having difficulty in getting my head around schools where the EA admission numbers are so different. If the universe size for EA were small that would make it understandable, but for places like Bentley where the EA rate is 15% higher and those applications take up nearly 25% of the total apps received? Or Butler with a 14% higher EA admission %age and nearly 40% of apps done via EA? I can’t understand that.</p>