<p>Okay I read an NYTimes article which says that
Uchicago had 10,317 EA Applicants with 19.51% accept rate - 1380 were accepted of the anticipated class of 1,400 </p>
<p>So does this mean they accepted only 20 applicants from RD ??</p>
<p>Please can someone explain this to me ...also please direct me to correct stats if they are not true</p>
<p>It is a question of yield. They had 1479 according the story below (before summer melt) and that means another 1310 or so were admitted during RD.</p>
<p>The 19.51% you list is growth of EA apps from previous year.</p>
<p>The OP is probably confusing Early Action at Chicago (and elsewhere) with Early Decision. With Early Decision, applicants are committed to enroll if admitted, except for circumstances that rarely get invoked. So 95-100% of students admitted ED wind up attending that school. Most colleges with ED admit 30-50% of their entering classes ED. It would be absurd to admit 95% of a class that way.</p>
<p>At Early Action colleges, including Chicago, MIT, Caltech, Georgetown, and of course Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford, students admitted EA are not required to enroll. So significantly fewer than 100% of EA acceptees wind up as part of the entering class. At Chicago, it’s probably in the range of 60% who enroll. The target for EA is probably to fill half the entering class (just like ED schools), although in the past few years they may have gotten more than that. So there’s roughly the same room to admit additional applicants in the Regular Decision round that you would find at competitors who use ED rather than EA.</p>
<p>The OP should read the table from The New York Times very carefully. It clearly states 13.38% accept rate for EA. If you make an estimate of regular accept rate based on the final accept rate 8.8%, you can get RD accept rate about 6%.</p>
<p>I think that’s true generally but not necessarily so clear with Chicago. Chicago gets a fair number of RD applications from people who thought they had a good chance for SCEA at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Stanford, but were disappointed. There are quite a lot of such people: about 17,000 last year. How many apply to Chicago? That’s anybody’s guess, but mine would be around 4,000 (or about 20% of the RD applications). That would be a big slug of people almost all of whom have off-the-chart stats.</p>
<p>By the way – most of the EA pool is neither accepted nor rejected EA, but deferred to RD. That means that the real RD acceptance rate is close to 5%, and that the real acceptance rate for EA applicants (taking into account RD) is probably in the vicinity of three times that.</p>
<p>That would be a fairly conservative estimate of the percentage of kids in each applicant pool who were offered admission last year. Deferred EA kids probably constituted about 20% of the RD pool. If they got 20% of the RD admissions, that would have added another 2+ percentage points to the EA admit rate. I doubt they got that many, but they certainly got some. And on the other side of that coin, the RD applicants did not get all of the admissions in the RD round. You can’t figure the real RD admit rate by dividing RD admissions by the number of RD applicants.</p>
<p>Thanks for clearing that up, JHS! I know this might not be the right thread to ask, but I can’t stop debating whether I should apply RD to Northwestern and EA to Chicago OR ED to Northwestern and EA to Chicago. Northwestern accepts a decent % of people during ED, and I must get into one of these two schools. Problem is UChicago is my number one school, and I don’t want to risk somehow getting into NU ED (it would be ideal if NU deferred me ED and UofC accepted me EA–a prospie can dream) without ever knowing my chances at UChicago. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do this entire year, and I’m still undecided! I know I’m a better fit at UofC, but it’s just so difficult to get in. Also, I don’t want to risk my chances of getting into either school by not applying ED to NU and just hoping UofC accepts me, if that makes sense.</p>