<p>yes or no?</p>
<p>by this question I do mean early decision/early action.</p>
<p>*not just Columbia but others in general if anybody's aware of it.</p>
<p>Yes at some schools, no at others. Not much of an answer, but that’s how it is.</p>
<p>early decision (ed) generally will give you a little boost because the schools know that it’s your first choice and that you will attend if you get in. i think penn openly states that they give a boost to ed applicants.</p>
<p>ea is a little more iffy. at super selective and massive applicant pool power-schools like stanford, yale, mit, maybe uchicago, etc i don’t think EA really gives you a boost (the higher acceptance rate is supposedly a result of more qualified applicants).</p>
<p>Then if I’d used my chances applying early action to Harvard instead of early decision to Princeton (I applied to college in 2004), Columbia, or Penn Wharton, did I waste my time?</p>
<p>(ps I got a 2310 on my SAT in current terms, I’m an international student, and I went to Brown)</p>
<p>“Selectivity also varies according to when one applies—that is, whether through a school’s early-decision program or during the regular admissions season. At the top schools in particular it is not unusual for early-decision applicants to be accepted at a rate two or three times that for regular-season applicants. At Princeton only eight percent of the candidates who applied during the regular admissions cycle in 2001 were accepted, but 31 percent of those who applied through the school’s early-decision program were accepted—an admission rate closer to that of USC or Boston College than of MIT or Harvard. Schools sometimes claim that their early-decision candidate pools are typically stronger than their regular-admissions pools, so one should expect some difference in the admission rates. But a recent study of fourteen highly selective schools by researchers at Harvard determined that on average, early-decision candidates had slightly lower SAT scores and class ranks than candidates who applied during the regular admissions season. The same study found that by applying early, students improved their chances of admission to a school by about as much as they would have if they’d scored 100 points higher on the SAT.”</p>
<p>Is this generally true?</p>
<p>Remember that, according to at least one former Ivy League admissions officer, approximately 40% of each class at these schools is represented by recruited athletes, legacy candidates, URMs and development candidates. For many of the candidates in that 40% block, their “hook” only applies in the ED round. Thus, these schools admit many folks in the ED round whose objective statistics may be, on average, less than their admitted brothers and sisters in the RD round. I doubt that “unhooked” admits in the ED round have objective statistics that are less, on average, than their admitted RD compatriots.</p>
<p>pbr is correct in pointing out that the much higher admit rates for ED are generally accounted for by recruited athletes, legacies, URMs, etc. </p>
<p>The average “unhooked” candidate gets little, if any, boost by applying ED rather than RD – although you will find many posters on CC swearing that is not true because, like Fox Mulder, they “want to believe.” :D</p>