<p>Does applying Early Action at University of Chicago improve chances of admission?</p>
<p>The admit rate is higher by about 8-10% according to CollegeBoard, but this may be due to the strength of the applicants.</p>
<p>EA is nice because there is a possibility of deferral and eventual admission. Deferral, by the way, is not a waitlist. They simply put you in the regular admission pool and you find out in April, it is like giving you two shots at admission. Better yet, if you are admitted in December you don't have to worry all Winter. There really is no reason to not apply EA.</p>
<p>The higher admit rate is not true. It's about 37% for BOTH - the acceptance rates for RD and EA are within 1% of each other. (They do that on purpose; they explained it during the info session).</p>
<p>There's a higher yield from EA, and I would imagine that if you are able to demonstrate a real interest, this "passion" for the school can push you farther in EA than it will in RD.</p>
<p>It's nice that they say that, but it's complete crap. If you look at the numbers from 2007, it was about 42% for EA (not counting EA deferrals admitted RD) and something around 30-33% for RD. Because it's not public how many EA applications were deferred, and how many of those were accepted, it's hard to tell what the actual percentages are in the RD pool. If you assumed that ALL of the non-accepted EA applications became part of the RD pool, the acceptance rate in the RD pool would be about 28%, but that doesn't happen.</p>
<p>The overall rate, including both ED and RD, was 36%.</p>
<p>Just out of curiosity, where did you get these numbers?</p>
<p>When I was applying, I distinctly remember reading that the rates were identical. That was one or two years ago, I believe when the acceptances were right at 40%.</p>
<p>I cant apply ED because of aid :(</p>
<p>Chicago offers a non-binding Early Action, so yes, you can apply.</p>
<p>I can't find the Maroon stories where I got the numbers anymore, but here is what I remember in round numbers (after checking some notes, which I didn't do before the prior post): 10,400 total applications, 3,050 EA and 7,350 RD. 1,350 EA acceptances (44%) and 3,600 overall acceptance (of which 2,250 must have been RD acceptances), for an overall acceptance rate of just under 35%. The University said that its RD admission rate was 26%, which is about right if you assume a relatively small number of applications was rejected rather than deferred at the EA stage.</p>
<p>The admit rate is supposed to be the same for both pools -- we engineer it that way. Our admission rate was 35% last year.</p>