At some schools, it appears that ED really increases your chances of admissions. At others, not so much. My DD will be applying next year. She will probably have a 3.9-4.0 UW GPA, and a SAT in the 1300-1400 range, maybe a little higher.
Her older brother had better test scores, but needed ED to get into another school, which is great, but pretty much shut him out of any merit. So, while Bucknell is her first choice, she really (or I really) would like some consideration for merit, which we felt the ED process excluded us from.
Total Merit aid (non-need based) amount was 6.3M (H1) for freshman, so not much in the grand scheme of things. We also don’t know how that money was broken down between ED and RD applicants.
Looking at the details: for students who demonstrated financial need, 115 (H2g) of them received non-need based monies (I am assuming in addition to need based aid but that’s not clear).
In section H2A, line o, there were 55 freshman with no demonstrated need who received non-need based aid of $18K on average.
Bottom line: without much money in merit aid, it could make sense to take the ED advantage…but do that as long as you are OK with being full pay. If any merit money comes your way that would be a bonus, but can’t be counted on.
And for one of the funniest things I have seen in a CDS, look at line H2h…rather than putting in the number of students whose need was fully met, they literally wrote ‘we don’t meet need’ in each column.
Can’t imagine the President of the University or Dean of Admissions would be happy to see that, lol.
I guess we are left to believe that Bucknell did not meet full need for any student…which would be really uncommon…even schools that don’t meet full need in toto, often meet full need for some select students that they really want.
Bucknell went through it’s entire wait list last cycle and still didn’t meet it’s target number. Given that history, if you’re numbers are in the ball park, applying to Bucknell ED should substantially increase your chances of acceptance. As far as merit goes, this is from Bucknell’s website:
“Most funding is awarded to students who have demonstrated institutional need as determined by Bucknell’s Office of Financial Aid, but a limited amount will also be awarded to those who do not have financial need or do not apply for aid.”
I don’t think you will be seeing much merit money with SAT’s in the 1300-1400 range.
My D graduated from Bucknell in 2018. The one place where you can look for merit money there without super high academic stats and/or some demonstrated need is Arts Merit for music, theater, dance, creative writing…and I believe they have upped the max award to $20k per year. They don’t award a ton of those scholarships maybe 5 theater awards per year for instance but I’m not sure how many are competing. In our experience it seemed like pure academic merit awards went to very high stats, highly accomplished students rather than “average excellent.”
A little late to this thread, but the Director of Admission told me himself that ED is weighted VERY heavily at Bucknell. My daughter applied ED 1 and was accepted. Also, overall ED1 applicants had a higher acceptance percentage than ED2 last year.
Looking at the numbers from the 2019-2020 data set – so high school class of 2019 and the most recent data available – the acceptance rate for ED was approximately 64.5% while RD was approximately 32%. ED is not broken down between 1 and 2.