Schools may want to manage yield with ED more for predictability than for its small effect on rankings. If half of the class is locked in early with 99% yield, then the expected error in the size of the matriculating class is smaller.
I agree generally, and specifically for the Ivies–ED shouldn’t be a strategy for a lower stats kid to get into an Ivy/elite school, which is what I’ve seen a lot of on here. But, I followed ED decisions for my alma mater, and found that they DO make it easier for an ED kid to get in with lower stats–I think for certain schools lower down the totem pole, the demonstrated interest of “I like you so much I am applying ED” does weigh in favor of kids with slightly less competitive stats. I was honestly surprised, and it changed how I’ll be chancing ED kids for my school specifically–they were way less stringent about GPAs and test scores in ED than I know they are during RD.
@NickFlynn is correct about the ACT and SAT numbers. In the HS Class of 2014, only 1,407 had a 36 and only 7,175 had a 35 composite score on the ACT (out of 1,845,787 students), and only 8,812 had 2300 or above on the SAT (out of 1,672,395 students).
My unscientific estimate is that 99.9% of these high scoring students post regularly on CC, so it’s easy to understand why it seems like there is no shortage of them. 
I think ED admittance rates are largely similar to RD for unhooked applicants, but the variance is more of an issue for hooked candidates. I think it can lower your chances if you are a hooked candidate and choose RD.
Option 2: skip applying to elites and apply to good public universities.
The “holistic” process means that the 4.0+, 35-36 ACT, 2300+ SAT kids are going to get squeezed out of top universities by hooked applicants/athletes/URMs with lower scores. It may make people mad or feel cheated, but that’s how it works in many cases.
The only true way to make top universities “pay” for passing up top kids is for top kids not to bother applying to their schools. Not likely to happen on a broad scale, but that is the plan we are following this year - and it is a much more pleasant year.
Any links to that evidence?
Published academic studies find just the opposite
As to “Moreover, turn it around, and try to come up with a sound justification for a policy that would offer increased admission chances to applicants that chose ED?” Ok. I’ll give five.
First, they forgo the chance to compare & negotiate with competing FA offers it is riskier to apply ED unless you don’t need the money. This favors wealthy applicants, something colleges are bound to have noticed. And prefer.
Second, colleges do care about rankings, and yield is a factor in the rankings.
Third, it offers colleges a chance to grab students they won’t get if they also get an offer from a more prestigious school. How many kids with an offer from Harvard and Dartmouth turn down Harvard? So Dartmouth sets up a program where a kid promises to enroll without seeing what Harvard says. It’s clear why Dartmouth would want to do that. But OP is claiming that you’ll get the same decision whether you apply ED or not. Why would any kid agree to ED if their chances at Dartmouth are the same if they apply RD and get the chance to see what Harvard decides?
Fourth, it forces students to reveal valuable information about their preferences. An ED school is your top choice after strategizing about your chances (maybe Stanford is your top choice, but you don’t think you can get in, so you apply ED to the best school where you think you do have a chance). As an Atlantic Monthly article a few years back says ‘“I would estimate that in the 1970s maybe forty percent of the students considered Penn their first choice,” dean of admissions Stetson told me recently. For the rest, Penn was the place that had said yes when their first choice had said no.’ Colleges want students that are happy to be there, not those with a chip on their shoulder they didn’t get into someplace “better” they felt should have taken them.
A fifth reason is a combo of the 3rd and 4th, but applies to colleges competing with peers. A kid with a decent chance of getting into Amherst, Williams, Middlebury, etc. can only enroll at one of them. By forcing the student to pick early the college wins 100% of its cross-admit cases. Again, easy to see why there is a reason for colleges to do this. But why would any applicant limit their choices if the OP is right and they’d get exactly the same decision if they applied RD?
Need to add that this is only applicable to those students in the “donut” hole income wise. If your family income is low enough, Yale, Harvard and most of the Ivy’s are free and better than any merit aid offer. If you are rich enough, the college costs don’t matter.
As an aside, in the past year a couple of kids at our HS have gotten in ED at lower Ivy’s. They picked those schools not because they were enamored with them, but they were less of a reach and the kids thought they had a better chance of getting in. It fits into point four.
However, there has to be a perceived advantage from the applicant’s viewpoint to apply ED (whether or not there is an actual advantage). Otherwise, why would an applicant give up the possibility of changing his/her mind or comparing financial aid and scholarship offers?
Now, it is possible that an applicant may hope to be done early (and not have to apply anywhere else) if s/he gets admitted ED to his/her first choice. But since the applicant still has to have other applications ready to go, the most it would help is the saving of application and test score report fees for those other schools which do not have deadlines before the ED notification comes – not a big enough advantage (and conditional on getting admitted ED) for many to give up the possibility of comparing financial aid and scholarship offers.
The trade-off with SCEA is lesser, since it mainly means giving up EA applications to other schools which fall under the restriction set by the SCEA school.
I agree generally with all your points and also find it sad that kids are applying to ED to schools they don’t seem to even know much about because they believe that it will get them into a more prestigious school; however, I do believe there are a handful of schools where there is a real benefit for the unhooked kid. This fall I listened to the Northwestern admissions director freely admit that there was an advantage to applying ED since they would be taking half their class from that pool – that’s still a pretty big chunk of unhooked kids who don’t have to compete with the kids who really want to go Ivy or Stanford. I’m sure this is most common among the higher ranked schools who are tired of being “safeties” for kids who are willing to go to any Ivy before considering anywhere else.
@NickFlynn – when you write your post on “perfect” scores, you may want to address the issue of superscoring. I agree with your numbers on single-sitting 2400’s or 35’s, but there’s simply no way to know the number of kids who took the SAT 3-4 times with heavy tutoring and managed to get their superscore perfect or near perfect and the kids who do that are the ones most likely to be applying to the super-selective schools. I’m pretty certain that those numbers reported out each fall about the entering classes are superscores if the university follows that practice.
@mikemac Thanks for the response - a couple of quick responses:
-
As for what evidence I’ve got to back up my claims - it’s not particularly comprehensive or conclusive, and it’s scattered all over the place. Colleges seem to leak out small tidbits here and there, and never in the kind of comprehensive manner that allows for the drawing of broad conclusions…it’s almost like they prefer to keep a lot of stuff obscure and difficult to nail down, one begins to think they prefer it that way. The evidence I see over and over again is that the released objective stats (test scores, grades) for ED admits seem to be pretty consistent with the overall and RD stats (which is actually fairly surprising given the high percentage of athletic admits in the ED pool). None of that rises to the level of proof, but it’s not really consistent at all with a model that asserts ED conveys a generic advantage.
-
I need to sit down and read the study you linked - at a quick glance, I did see a couple of issues, but I need to look more carefully before I make an jerk out of myself with a specific comment. Thanks for the link in any event, I hadn’t seen this before. I’ll check it out and then come back and make a jerk out of myself.
-
Your list of reasons don’t really address my point - you’ve provided an excellent list of reasons for colleges to use ED/REA programs to achieve their goals, and for the most part, I’m in agreement…
But that’s not the point I was making (and this ties in with what I said in above in paragraph 1 ) - as long as the rubes (sorry, applicants) BELIEVE that there is an advantage to ED and apply in sufficient numbers, the schools don’t have to provide any explicit advantage to keep the programs functioning - why put your thumb on the scales if you don’t have to?
@ucbalumnus I think the idea of a perceived advantage (which is the point I was trying to make in my response to mikemac above) is crucial here. I don’t think there is any doubt that the “perceived advantage” for a lot of applicants is clearly larger than it could possibly be, even if you don’t buy most or all of my cynical take on it.
There can be no doubt at all that there is much higher percentage of hooked applicants in the ED pool than the RD pool - this is open and acknowledged by the schools, it is POLICY to route athletic recruits and (at some schools) legacies into those pools. Schools openly admit that pools are wealthier, whiter, and more likely to come from private schools, etc, etc…
Anyone who doesn’t acknowledge that the ED admit rate should naturally be a lot higher than the RD rate is clearly delusional - the question is how much?
“The much higher admit rate is primarily a function of the large numbers of hooked applicants in the pool.”
This is basically it, in a nutshell.
Subtract out the legacies, donors, athletes, URMs, etc., and there are few spots for unhooked applicants.
This is anecdotal, but some schools that come to mind in terms of ED chances being higher than RD for unhooked applicants are Penn, Duke, Wash. U., Vanderbilt, and Northwestern. How much higher? Not sure, maybe not that much. But for some high stats kids on bubble, it seems to matter at some elite schools. Probably not at HYPSM. Also agree that ED will not lead to acceptance for unhooked students with sub-par stats and otherwise below average applications.
Re-reading the Atlantic Monthly piece from a few years back I saw an explicit statement from Penn that early applicants had an advantage
I think Early Decision is beneficial to students who want to attend their state flagship and are a reach for that flagship.
@suzyQ7 except for the fact that most state flagships don’t offer ED…
Agree that the ED advantage is probably a lot smaller than what most regular non-hooked applicants think it is (though it varies by college). But colleges presumably try to play up the ED advantage by releasing ED versus RD admission rates, without any indication of the relative applicant pools (general strength and hooks), which probably exaggerates the ED advantage.
The result is that, in early fall, there are lots of students here asking “which college should I apply ED to?”, indicating that the perceived ED advantage is overriding the fact that the student is unsure of which college actually is his/her top choice.
I agree with the OP and UWfromCA that there cannot be the number of academic superstars that some would think. Obviously many of them hang out on CC.
As UWfromCA noted, in the HS Class of 2014, there were only 8,582 students with a 35-36 on the ACT (out of 1,845,787 students) and only 8,812 had 2300 or above on the SAT (out of 1,672,395 students). But many of the high achieving kids are likely to “double up” and post top numbers on both the ACT and SAT. Once you take out the double counting for stars that ace both the ACT and SAT, I believe that you are probably talking about 12,000 “testing” stars.
Not a huge number, especially when you consider the total pool of 18 years old. There were 4.2 million 18 year olds in 2014. Every year, approximately 3.3 million students graduate high school (approx. 78% of the total # of 18 year olds). So we are talking about 12,000 testing stars out of 3.3 million high school graduates. That’s 1 out of every 275 high school graduates.
I would also estimate that perhaps 10% of the testing superstars don’t back up their big test numbers with superlative performance in the classroom. The slackers, the geniuses who just don’t care about studying, etc. If my estimate is close, that would leave us with only about 10,800 academic stars. That is substantially less than the number of slots which open up each year at top tier schools. Every year, approximately 14,000 freshman enroll at Ivy league schools. If you include MIT, Caltech, Stanford, U of C and Duke, you can add another 4,500 spots. Include Notre Dame, Georgetown, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Rice, Johns Hopkins and WUSTL and you can add another 8,000 slots. 8,100 more between NYU and USC. And I haven’t even mentioned the 6,200 freshman at Michigan, the 4,000 at UNC, the 3,500 at UVA. For those still following along, that’s about 50,000 slots for those 25 schools (or approximately 28,000 for the first 20 schools listed above). Anyway, I think NickFlynn was right when he talked about how the numbers play out between the academic superstars and the top universities.
Agree with the above poster, except my guess is that 10% is probably a bit low on the superstar test takers who come up short in terms of GPA. (Maybe I’m biased because back in the last century, I was one of those kids - LOL!)
I think especially when you combine GPA with the kind of course rigor the top colleges seem to expect, it’s somewhat higher than 10%, but whatever it is, there are definitely fewer of those “perfect kids” than most people seem to realize.
Question about the 8,812 number - does that refer to the number of of 2300+ scores on each individual SAT administration, or at any point during that year’s testing?