<p>like the title indicates, im wondering if its strategically worth applying Ed. i lovecolumbia and im also afraid i have a 3 percent shot of getting in so is the assumption that ED helps wrong?</p>
<p>it helps, mr. brown. the university knows you have to go if you get accepted, thereby increasing their yield, so it’s a bit more generous. plus, some qualified applicants don’t want to be “bound” to columbia by ED contract, and that makes it slightly less competitive. plus you can always be deferred.</p>
<p>sorry, this has probably been asked before (and likely by me), but do you really like columbia if your username is brown?</p>
<p>Maybe his last name is Brown? Or he likes the color brown? Or he is brown? There are a variety of reasons his name could be Brown and not all related to the university that happens to share that name.</p>
<p>In any case, no one is really sure whether ED actually helps. The admissions officers will tell you that it does not help at all; they usually say that a person who got in ED was also likely to get in regular decision. They attribute the higher acceptance rate in the ED pool to the self-selecting nature of the ED students, many of whom are legacies, athletes, and at the top of their class.</p>
<p>However, people on CC swear that it helps, and a couple of them claim to have spoken to admissions officers that say that it does, even though no admissions officer will come out publicly and say that applying ED helps. At this point I am of the opinion that it can give a VERY borderline applicant a slight nudge to the positive side. So if you feel like you’re borderline, it may help. If you really did only have a 3% chance of admissions to Columbia, ED probably wouldn’t help you that much. If you are already solidly in their top group of applicants, it’s also not going to help very much.</p>
<p>In any case, you should apply to ED if Columbia is your clear, 100% #1 choice school, and if you reasonably believe that your parents can afford Columbia. You can back out of the agreement if they do not offer you sufficient financial aid, but Columbia meets 100% of need, so that would be hard to prove.</p>
<p>When the OP first signed up, he/she had his/her eyes set on Brown. But after visiting Columbia, brown14 claims, Columbia has become the number 1 choice.</p>