<p>SCEA usually refers to single choice early action. Colleges like Stanford and Harvard offer that option, where you agree not to apply ED anywhere, and not apply EA to other colleges, although there are various large loopholes. At Stanford and Harvard, the SCEA applicant can still apply EA to public colleges, rolling admissions anywhere, early for scholarships, or to foreign colleges on any schedule.</p>
<p>Like any statistics you can twist the results to fit your viewpoint. Looking over that list of where EA helps students, it could just be said that your better students happen to be more organized and just plain old busy so they got everything together before school started senior year and applied early.</p>
<p>Also, we were discussing this on another thread, Notre Dame is listed there as having a higher admit rate for EA vs RD–except that Notre Dame goes out of their way to make it clear that unless you are at the top of their applicant pool, perfect GPA, test scores, EC’s, they do NOT want you applying EA and your chances of getting in are less, however, according to that table, they do have a higher admit rate EA, BUT they are only looking at the best and the brightest then so it makes sense that more of those kids get accepted.</p>
<p>ED and SCEA REDUCES college applications to other schools. EA seems to have the opposite effect. Kids get their EA “safety” and then determine that hey, I got into School X! Why not apply to the Ivies!?" And I agree they can apply to anywhere they want, and it’s not necessarily about an EA advantage but a RD DISADVANTAGE.</p>
<p>I am not saying they shouldn’t apply to wherever they want, but what I am saying is that while college admissions has changed considerably in my 10 years of experience, when students traditionally first meet with college counselors and how THAT side of the process works has not, even in the private schools. </p>
<p>By a lot of standards, we have excellent college counseling. All juniors take a seminar class about college applications and meet with their counselor one on one for a lengthy review of their transcript, etc in the spring of junior year. But I was talking to the head of college counseling the other day and he’s been doing this for close to 25 years. Even he admitted they were surprised with the growing number of EA schools and kids going that way these days and how that has translated to a lot of WL’s and flat out rejections in the regular decision pool that in years past would have been almost sure admits. </p>
<p>And I don’t buy that the majority of these “better” kids are more organized on their own. However, perhaps by “better” SteveMA is referring to their parents? 
The GC I spoke with confirms that the kids aren’t generally more mature these days then they were 20 years ago, as much as their parents are insisting on being in every meeting and some, unfortunately, seem to act as if their kids are secondary to the process. </p>
<p>But that’s a different subject. My thinking is that instead of looking at Jan 1 deadlines, kids should be instructed to get their applications done BEFORE the start of their senior year. Not as a suggestion, but as a way the system works. You can look at the schools like Notre Dame and decide to wait, etc, but for all others. Click admit as soon as your able. </p>
<p>And as that happens, more and more kids who DON’T have proactive counselors are going to find themselves further disadvantaged in the system. So much for diversity, except that it will become more of a hook in RD! The cycle becomes a cyclone.</p>
<p>However, and another point made by our GC, by pushing up the admissions process in its entirety, are we really doing what’s best for the development of the individual? Making them forego what lessons they are supposed to be taking away from this time on their life in their hurry for the prize of getting into a top college? What are we making them trade for this?</p>
<p>My son dropped two schools from his list when he applied EA - one was a safety the other a match/reach. It would be interesting to see if EA increases applications, but that hasn’t been my experience. My older son probably wouldn’t have done any more applications at all if he’d gotten into his EA schools. (He hated writing essays that much!)</p>
<p>The Avery paper that I linked to above uses a much more sophisticated methodology than looking at simple acceptance rates. Although colleges pretty much uniformly claim that applying EA or ED gives little or no advantage it’s hard to take that at face value when EA have marginally better credentials and are accepted at several times the rate of RD applicants at many school. Furthermore, the Avery paper constructs a model where it is rational for colleges to give preferences to early applicants because applying early signals preferences about a school. It also gives other reasons that colleges would give considerably advantages to ED applicants.</p>
<p>I’ll second mathmom that my kid dropped two safeties from her list after getting into a SCEA school. Maybe you’re drawing a distinction between EA and SCEA, in which case our data point wouldn’t affect your argument.</p>
<p>^ Yes, I think there is a different between SCEA - which is essentially just a non-binding form of ED. But according to that Yale News Link comments section above (from 2009), it was determined that more than half of Yale’s class of 2014 filled in the early round.</p>
<p>In very simple terms, the difference between a “deadline” and when you SHOULD apply are two very different things for most schools, especially those schools who offer an EA option. Waiting for the deadline or thinking that you’ll be equally considered if you apply by the deadline only applies to all other kids in RD round. And the only thing that holds true for those kids is they’re all “late.”</p>
<p>I get why schools like ED and EA. Im just wondering if we’re failing to consider who colleges are in business to serve.</p>
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<p>Maybe because they’re not aiming at the Ivies? Look at the schools on that USNWR list; some may serve as safeties, but the majority of students attending them don’t have the stats to be applying to super-selectives. A student interested in Colleges that Change Lives would be able to send out a bunch of EA applications and hopefully have some great choices in hand by the winter. Those kids are unlikely to suddenly think they’ve got the stuff to apply to Harvard.</p>
<p>Or because the EA school is much loved, or very much a reach? Applying to UChicago/MIT/Caltech is a common triad. Any of those schools could well be a first choice. Calling one of those a “safety” is laughable until you’re admitted. And a student who’s applying to those schools with a solid shot at getting in isn’t suddenly going to think that they’ve got the stuff for applying to an Ivy. They already know they do. </p>
<p>One of the best uses of EA is as a gut check. A student who applies EA to true safeties or matches and doesn’t get in has time to adjust their full list. They can add a few RD schools that are more safety/match-ish.</p>
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<p>Yes. Especially if the student is applying to publics, which often have earlier deadlines (e.g. California and Maryland (for merit aid)) and/or rolling admissions (e.g. Pennsylvania and Alabama).</p>
<p>I don’t think there is anything “new” about EA. I was surprised that it didn’t exist at as many schools when D10 was applying to colleges as it did when I applied many years ago. For so many of the top schools, your choices are only ED or RD.</p>
<p>What MAY be changing is that MORE and MORE kids (sheer numbers) are applying Early.
Anecdotally, it really seems that way to me.</p>
<p>Anyone (less lazy than I am) remember what the trends are in numbers of Early apps?</p>
<p>If the colleges are seeing lots more apps, and good ones, Early, that may explain the relatively high acceptance rates???</p>
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This.</p>
<p>About 1/2 of DD’s applications this year required EA to be considered for scholarships. And once the apps are done for some, it takes little or no extra effort to apply EA to others, so why not just get it done? I don’t see the downside.</p>
<p>She had no interest though in suddenly applying to a bunch of reaches on a whim after getting a few EA acceptances. I’m not sure I see a lot of kids doing that, especially if the school requires significant new essays.</p>
<p>My D applied EA to one super-reach and one safety. She was accepted w/merit at the safety and deferred at the reach. The early read was important to us because our school hadn’t adopted Naviance yet so we had very limited ability to assess how D’s grades & scores would be received. Her results confirmed that we had assessed “safety” “match” and “reach” correctly. If she’d been rejected from both EAs, we would’ve dropped some of the other reaches on her list and added more safety and match schools in the RD round.</p>
<p>Here’s a factor that may have something to do with what Modadunn is feeling, at least if her kid was applying to colleges that top students consider “matches”:</p>
<p>This year almost 18,000 students applied SCEA to HYPS. That’s 18,000 unique people – none of them could submit more than one SCEA application. What’s more, none of them applied EA or ED to any other college. And – with the possible exception of recruited athletes – almost all of them were probably among the very strongest applicants out there. Apart from being organized enough to apply early, each of them thought enough of his or her chances to forgo much better chances at other colleges – applying ED to Brown or Columbia, say, or EA to MIT, Chicago, Caltech, and Georgetown – in order to apply SCEA.</p>
<p>Fewer than 3,000 of them were admitted to the SCEA college to which they applied. That means that 15,000 top-of-the-line applicants showed up in the RD applicant pools of other Ivies and highly selective colleges who had not been in their EA/ED pools. Not all of them apply to every college, of course, but I suspect so many high-quality candidates make a big impact at places like MIT, Brown, Penn, Chicago, WashU, Tufts, Northwestern. </p>
<p>It’s not at all hard to imagine that the top 10-15% of their RD applicant pool is stronger than all but a handful of their EA/ED applicants. That may explain why a kid who matches up perfectly well with the pool of applicants accepted EA may find himself on the short end of the stick RD.</p>
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<p>Harvard’s SCEA applicants do not have to agree not to apply EA to public schools, rolling admissions schools, or foreign schools. The SC limitation only applies to private schools in the US that are not rolling admissions.</p>
<p>[Harvard</a> College Admissions § Applying: Early Action](<a href=“http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/application_process/early.html]Harvard”>http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/application_process/early.html)</p>
<p>So what? I don’t think Modadunn was talking about public universities, and she couldn’t have been talking about rolling admissions colleges or foreign institutions. So that nuance of Harvard’s policy is irrelevant to this discussion.</p>
<p>In any event, I believe Harvard is now the only one of the four colleges that allows early applications to non-home-state public universities.</p>
<p>I agree with Notrichenough. Son applied to a couple of EA schools, and since they were all Common app anyway, he just applied to the rest EA as well. When acceptances started to come in from November, there was no urge to apply to more reach schools or anything like that. The only ‘work’ left to do after EA deadlines, was to write separate essays for the various scholarships at a few of the schools.</p>
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<p>Stanford REA (SCEA) allows EA to any public school:
[Restrictive</a> Early Action : Stanford University](<a href=“http://www.stanford.edu/dept/uga/application/decision_process/restrictive.html]Restrictive”>http://www.stanford.edu/dept/uga/application/decision_process/restrictive.html)</p>
<p>So does Princeton SCEA:
[Princeton</a> University | Single-Choice Early Action](<a href=“http://www.princeton.edu/admission/applyingforadmission/single-choice-early-actio/]Princeton”>http://www.princeton.edu/admission/applyingforadmission/single-choice-early-actio/)</p>
<p>Yale SCEA allows EA to public schools in your home state:
[Single-Choice</a> Early Action for Freshman Applicants | Yale College Admissions](<a href=“http://admissions.yale.edu/scea]Single-Choice”>http://admissions.yale.edu/scea)</p>