<p>Does EA have a better chance then the regular application? Thanks.</p>
<p>Any thoughts and insights from anyone? Thank you all very much.</p>
<p>Mathematically speaking, for the Class of 2014, that appeared to be the case, and the difference was very significant. Scroll through the posts on this web site for details.</p>
<p>The Admissions Office maintains the same standards for both the EA pool and the RD pool. That said, the EA pool is smaller than the RD pool, so it may be easier to stand out or show creativity. If you have your application prepared and don’t need to show senior year grades, the Office recommends going ahead and applying early. Just remember - don’t rush or hastily arrange anything just to make the early deadline.</p>
<p>A year ago, I would have said that there wasn’t really any (or very much) difference. Historically, the percentage of applications accepted EA was always a little higher than the percentage accepted RD, but the difference wasn’t that much, and it was easy to believe that things like athletic recruiting and a somewhat stronger pool with more clearly defined preference for Chicago accounted for the difference. </p>
<p>Last year, however, there was a huge difference between the admission percentages. If memory serves, almost 30% of EA applications were accepted, and less than 15% of the RD applications (some of which went to deferred EA applicants). That difference appeared to have been deliberate. About 300 more students were accepted EA than in previous years, and by the time the EA acceptances were finalized the Admissions Office surely had enough information to know that its RD applications were going to be much higher than they had been the year before. And when RD decision time came around, lots of students who probably would have been admitted in previous years were turned away. So it looked like the new Dean of Admissions made a choice to favor EA applications.</p>
<p>A couple of things are worth noting.</p>
<ol>
<li> Non-binding, non-restrictive Early Action schools like Chicago and MIT get far more EA applications than Early Decision schools get Early Decision applications, or Restricted (or Single-Choice) Early Action schools get their flavor of application. Yale, for example, got about 50% more applications last year than Chicago (and that was the closest Chicago has come in a couple of generations), but they got almost the same number of early applications. Brown gets almost as many more applications overall, but far fewer ED applications than Chicago’s EA applications. So when Brown fills 40% of its class slots ED, it’s doing it from about 15% of its overall applicant pool, but when Chicago fills 40% of its acceptance slots EA, the EA pool may be 30% of its overall applicant pool.<br></li>
</ol>
<p>In other words, the EA “advantage” is never as big as the ED advantages you may be used to seeing. Sometimes there’s clearly no advantage at all. At MIT the past few years, the EA and RD admission rates have been practically equal. At Ivy League schools with ED, the ED admission rate is usually 3-4 times the RD admission rate.</p>
<ol>
<li> Chicago’s application numbers the past few years have been so dynamic, so rapidly changing, that it’s not realistic to expect anyone there to really know what he or she is doing. Officially, they can talk about “the same standards” all they want, and really mean it. But the number of kids they can accept every year doesn’t change much. Recently, it has been 3,600-3,800 (to get an ultimate class of about 1,300). And the number of kids who applied for those acceptances more than doubled from the class of 2009 to the class of 2014. If you have to pick 3,600 kids from a pool of 20,000, there is no way you can use the same standards as you would use with a pool of 10,000.</li>
</ol>
<p>They are making it up as they go along. No year in the past two or three has looked much like any prior year. Maybe after the shock of last year, this year will finally be the year when things settle down and become predictable again. But I doubt it.</p>
<p>The point is that no one, not even the Admissions Office staff, really knows what the standard will be until they start applying it to applications they actually see.</p>
<p>Thank you all very much. This is very helpful.</p>
<p>As an EA applicant of last year, I’d highly recommend applying EA. I can’t tell you if it’ll improve your chances of admission, but there aren’t really any cons because…</p>
<ol>
<li>You will have your application done and out of the way by November 1. It’s a nice feeling.</li>
<li>You find out mid-December. That is an even nicer feeling. UChicago was my first acceptance letter. I danced around my house for an hour out of excitement. And I knew that I was into my dream school months ahead of most other college decisions. Waiting until April 1 is brutal. </li>
<li>If last year proved anything, there is a statistically better chance, although that might all change. At any rate, applying EA might demonstrate more interest, which is a factor in UChicago admissions.</li>
</ol>
<p>See? No downside. Now, get working! November’s creeping up fast! </p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>A small point, but if showing interest is a factor in Chicago admissions, that’s a big change from the past. A number of colleges DO take into account whether a candidate has visited, interviewed, or shown interest in other ways, but in the past Chicago has said it doesn’t consider that. (And it would definitely be un-Chicagoish to turn down an applicant the admissions staff considered intellectually superior in favor of one who had sucked up more.)</p>
<p>S2 applied EA last year, too, and was very happy he did, even though he ultimately decided at 8 pm on 5/1 to attend elsewhere. S1 is a rising third-year. Both of them felt it was important to visit campus and talk to people, and felt that gave them some substantive material to work within their essays about why they wanted to attend and how they were a good fit. They applied that philosophy to every school to which they applied, but especially honed it for their top choices (and they both got into every one of their top choices).</p>
<p>Neither ever returned the postcards.</p>
<p>admissions offices can say all they want to the effect that they use the same standards for EA and RD. BUt, when the acceptance rate is 30+% vs. under 15%, I am not going to believe this official party line unless they actually publish objective stats for SAT middle 50%, GPA, class rank etc that backs up their story. what do they mean by “same standards” anyway? It’s not like they have a cut off score for objective tests. </p>
<p>The “same standard” schtick will also stick only if the EA applicants are THAT MUCH STRONGER/BETTER QUALIFIED so that 30% of the smaller group of EA applicants are just as well qualified as 15% of the RD applicants. I HIGHLY doubt it. (if anything, I was left with the impression that EA was a bit easier on the students with lower stats based on cursory perusing through the admitted students’ stats - this is NOT a scientific proof though)</p>
<p>Apply early. What’s the downside? If you get rejected, it means that you were no where near the target zone anyway since majority of those not accepted in the EA round were deferred anyway. If you get deferred, you can still take another SAT if that’s why would improve your RD chances, show terrific mid year school report, continue to show interest in the school, etc. The only thing you probably can’t change is the essay. So, do that part thoroughly and as best as you can. </p>
<p>Having gone through S1’s application processes and going through another one this year for S2, I have become very cynical toward the “official party lines” of admissions offices.</p>
<p>By the way, Chicago is a terrific school. S1 is giddy with anticipation to go back to school as a second year in a week. He is flourishing there beyond our and his wildest expectation in every possible dimension - academically, socially, intellectually, personally, and professionally.</p>
<p>one more thing: in the process of checking school data for my S2, I encountered SAT stats for one top rated LAC. This is the only school I found, so far, that published their SAT middle 50% data for the all admits vs. ED admits. The middle 50% of the CR+M combined scores for all admits were about 50-60 points higher than the ED only group. Given that close to 20% of all admits were ED admits, the true difference between RD only group vs. ED group is probably even higher than 50-60 points. This is a BIG difference. I highly doubt that this school is an exception. More likely, this is the case for most ED schools, with different gaps depending on the competitive nature of the schools’ admission scenes. </p>
<p>Granted, this is ED, not EA, but I won’t be surprised at all if the EA admits stats are a bit lower than the RD stats, BUT not by that much since it’s non-restricted EA.</p>
<p>All points support the recommendation that you are better off doing EA anyway: it gives you two bites of the same apple.</p>
<p>Agreed with hyeonjlee. Official party lines are bull, for every university. What’s sad is that the applicants eat them right up. It’s like when MIT admits 30% of female applicants and 10% of male applicants, while claiming that this discrepancy is due to the “fact” that only serious female applicants apply. Everybody eats this right up, and it annoys the hell out of me. Think for yourself; don’t take what’s given to you. You don’t do it for the government; why would you do it for universities?</p>
<p>The EA acceptance admit rate will likely be around 25% this year, with the RD rate being around 10%. Does this look equal to you? And as an independent thinker, do you really agree with the claim that the EA pool is significantly (about 150% from the look of it) more qualified than the RD pool? Make your decision based on this raw data and not the lines the university feeds you.</p>
<p>A little commentary on the drumbeat here:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>One of the reasons early-anything admits as a group may have lower numbers than RD admits as a group, especially at smaller LACs, is that most athletic recruiting and admission is done through ED at those schools. If the LAC, like many LACs, is admitting 30-50% of its class ED, a huge proportion of those ED admits – half or even more – may be athletic recruits who are not being admitted primarily for their GPAs or test scores.</p></li>
<li><p>Another factor that may come into play in hyeonjlee’s figures is this: It looks like the college is reporting data on the students it accepts, not just the students it enrolls, something that is very uncommon. (I surmise that because very few colleges with ED admit as little as 20% of their classes ED, but it would not be surprising at all if ED acceptances were 20% of all acceptances – that is the ballpark for lots of top institutions.) Anyway, the pool of accepted students always has higher scores than the pool of enrolled students, because it’s the people with the best numbers who tend to have the most options and who are therefore more likely to take one of the other ones. Amherst’s RD pool has a lot of people in it who legitimately hope to attend Harvard, and quite a number of them do, even if they were accepted to Amherst. But the ED pool is an enrolled-student pool, because of the binding nature of ED applications.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>JHS is right: there is difference in terms of stats for admitted students vs. enrolled students for the reason he articulated. These two sets of numbers can be obtained fairly easily. School web sites usually publish “admitted students” stats. Then, if you go to the Common Data Set they publish according to the government guideline for apples and apples comparison, they provide enrolled students stats.</p>
<p>What was highly unusual about this college was the fact that they published also the ED only stats. I wish more schools do that. I have not seen any other school do it.</p>
<p>Here is the actual data.</p>
<p>For all admitted students: CR: 610-710 M: 650-740
For enrolled students: CR: 600-680 M: 630-720
For ED admits: CR: 600-670 M: 630-710</p>
<p>Given that 25% marker seems to be stable while the 75% marker is volatile, this is a further proof that it’s the top end of the students who jump the ship (meaning, admitted RD students who choose to go somewhere else). Also, note that stats for enrolled students and admitted students are fairly similar while stats for all admitted students are significantly higher, which further tells me that the difference between the ED admits and RD only admits must be even further pronounced.</p>
<p>Again, this is just one school, and this is an ED school. But, you can still come away with a fairly plausible conclusion that even in the EA school, the stats for the EA admits are likely to be lower than those of the RD admits. Conclusion: for the same stats, you stand better odds of getting admitted if you apply early. </p>
<p>Besides, consider institution incentives: every school wants to increase the yield rate. If they feel that a given student is motivated enough that if admitted, s/he is likely to enroll, the school is more like to err on the side of admitting this student as opposed to someone who may have thrown in an application at the last minute after s/he was rejected from all other EDs and what not. EA application is one very powerful signal a student can send to the colleges that they are MOTIVATED. </p>
<p>One might say that lofty, and “life of the mind” pursuing Chicago won’t play this kind of game. I don’t agree with this. The new dean of admission who was partly responsible for the amazing application and admission feat for the class of 2014 is just the kind of person who will refuse to leave anything on the table in terms all possible ways to win in the admissions game vis a vis Chicago’s competitors (the Ivies, etc) (by the way, I support him on this domain: another line of discussion - a highly heated one at that).</p>
<p>I say this again: if you can wing it, apply EARLY. </p>
<p>The timing of application application is the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT STRATEGIC TOOL an “ordinary” student (read, not athlete, scion of mega wealth, etc) has in winning the college admissions game. Don’t squander this opportunity because some “PC” statement schools say on camera (if you know what I mean). As for my S2, he is going to apply ED in Nov to his dream school. And if he is not admitted, he is going to try January ED II in another high runner school, along with RD schools.</p>
<p>I’m surprised that nobody’s brought up the book, “The Early Admissions Game”. Basically, the authors’ research determined that applying ED (not EA) confers about the same advantage as scoring an additional 150 points on the SAT (on a 1600 scale). EA is 100 pts. Interestingly, they did find that EA applicants really are a bit stronger than the normal pool, though not enough to justify the higher rates of acceptance. ED applicants were weaker of course.</p>