It is over the entire year, and it only counts the top score for each individual student.
I collected several such statements from admissions websites several years ago. The benefits of ED were debated long before that, and the same old points are still being rehashed today.
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/12885597/#Comment_12885597
Most of these have since vanished from the admissions websites.
Looking at your thoughts on this. You’ve probably already seen this on another thread:
ND REA acceptance rate is just over 30% (1600 out of 5300).
Recent years, overall acceptance rate during RD + REA is 21%.
Your thesis is that a “regular”, unhooked applicant is incorrect in assuming that he/she has a 42% higher chance of getting accepted REA vs RD at ND.
Do you think most of the REA accepted applicants are recruited athletes at ND?
Forgot to mention…Merry Christmas to all on this thread. Hope you’re enjoying the holidays.
@NickFlynn While I agree with much that you have said, especially the part that reach applicants will not get a boost from ED, I do think that examining the numbers, at some types of schools there is a bigger boost than at others. Two factors to look at are overall size of the school and % of the class that is filled ED. A very small LAC, for instance like Haverford or Williams is percentage wise going to have a much higher % of ED admits that are athletes or hooked, than say a slightly larger school like for example Lehigh. So at a school that admits 40-50% of the class early, and one that is not tiny- you would stand to get more of a boost from ED if you are a qualified (high end or higher than the mid 50) range, than you would get at a very small school.
@TurnerT - your comment about the College class of 2020 Facebook pages for ED kids rings true - there are a lot of athletes. My D who is not an athlete was admitted ED to a LAC ( not a teeny tiny one) and there is a high percentage of athletes on the page, though certainly there was room for non athletes as well. She chose ED b/c the school was her clear first choice and she didn’t want to get lost in the RD pool. Her stats put her at the high end of the mid 50 range, though not above it, so she was a solid applicant, but also knew that in RD there would be many more kids like her for the ad comes to choose from. So for her, an unhooked applicant, ED worked. Would she have gotten in RD? She may well have, but we do think for this particular school and set of circumstances that ED was the best strategy.
@wisteria100 Definitely agree that the size of the school can reduce the impact of athletes in the ED pool…and pretty much everything else you said.
Merry Christmas everybody!!! I agree with OP - I think the very fact that colleges accept deferred applicants in the regular pool shows that there isn’t really a boost to applying early - they get accepted regular but not early
I think any of you who thinks ED isn’t helpful for admissions is deluded. And I think one of the main reasons for the LACs to do it is that their financial aid isn’t all that good so they can hide that by getting students to only see their financial aid. My kid is above 75th percentile with a great application and just got wait-listed at 3 of them including her #1 choice. If her #1 would have given a pre-read and it looked good, we would have done it. But they wouldn’t. I have input from other people that their financial aid may not be as great as they make it out to be, so it makes sense for them to not want to have people get options. ED = more rich people locked in. Done.
I’ve run some numbers to get to the bottom of this:
Ok so 16 percent of Penn’s class of 2019 are legacy.
Legacies have a 40% acceptance rate at penn.
So that means that 161.4 = 22.4% of applicants were legacy
We can assume that around 80 percent of legacies apply in the ED round, which would be
22.4.80= ~20 percent of applicants were legacies the early decision round.
Now about 15-20% of Penn’s class is made up of sports recruits
Sports recruits should have about a 30% acceptance rate,
17.5*1.3= ~23 percent of applicants were sports recruits
We can assume that about 70 percent of recruits apply in the ED round
23*.7= ~16 percent of applicants in the ED round were recruits.
Adding that up, around 35 percent of applicants in the ED round are legacies or sports recruits.
5489 total ED applicants times 35 percent is ~1900 .
The average acceptance rate for Legacies and Sports Recruits combined is 35%. This means that 665 of the people accepted in last year’s ED round had the Legacy or Sports Recruit Hooks.
Number or people accepted to penn ED is 1,316- 665= 651 accepted ed with no Hook.
651/ 5489= ~ 12-15 percent acceptance rate for regular, non hook, applicants in the ED round.
Now correct me if I’m wrong, but those are certainly better odds than 9.4, or probably 8.9 this year.
Colleges Like Penn are progressively accepting more in the ED round and less in the RD round, which would push my estimated acceptance rate closer to 15 percent.
Interpret the numbers for yourself, correct me if I’m wrong in any of my calculations.
@actprep34 – why would you think that athletes would only have a 30% acceptance rate? I would think that recruited athletes’ acceptance rate would be much closer to 100%. Not 100%, but close. I have no stats to back this up other than watching recruiting at our HS, so welcome your input.
I thought I had read somewhere that the Ivies all recruit close to the same # of athletes, with no school above 250 +/-, which would recruited athletes closer to 10% of the class.
Some of the athletes may also be legacies…
I have not rerun your numbers, but sense that bumping the admit rate up to closer to 100% and the % of the class down to 10% would impact your bottom line.
[Update] @CT1417
Rerun with your corrections:
Ok so 16 percent of Penn’s class of 2019 are legacy.
Legacies have a 40% acceptance rate at penn.
So that means that 161.4 = 22.4% of applicants were legacy
We can assume that around 85 percent of legacies apply in the ED round, which would be
22.4.85= ~19 percent of applicants were legacies the early decision round.
Now about 10% of Penn’s class is made up of sports recruits
Sports recruits should have about a 95% acceptance rate,
101.05= ~ 10* % percent of applicants were sports recruits
We can assume that about 95 percent of recruits apply in the ED round
10*.95 = ~9.5 percent of applicants in the ED round were recruits.
Adding that up, around 28 percent of applicants in the ED round are legacies or sports recruits.
5489 total ED hook applicants times 28 percent is ~1500
The average acceptance rate for Legacies and Sports Recruits combined is ~65% . This means that ~950 of the people accepted in last year’s ED round had the Legacy or Sports Recruit Hooks.
Number or people accepted to penn ED is 1,316- 950= ~400 accepted ed with no Hook.
400/ (5489-1500)= ~10-12.5 percent acceptance rate for regular, non hook, applicants in the ED round.
Now correct me if I’m wrong, but those are certainly better odds than 9.4, or probably 8.4 this year.
Colleges Like Penn are progressively accepting more in the ED round and less in the RD round, which would push my estimated acceptance rate closer to 13 percent.
Interpret the numbers for yourself, correct me if I’m wrong in any of my calculations.
Personal Note: I’ve personally seen a few kids from my school last year- which typically sends about 0- 0.5% of its class to the Ivy league- get into ivies on the early decision round last year. Don’t tell me that all three of them getting in was a coincidence.They were all moderately qualified, but none of the world-class. No one before had ever applied ED, and no one before had EVER gone to ivies. 13% increases your chances of getting in by a factor of 1.5. Early Decision can still benefit you greatly if you are not a hook in my opinion.
re-RE-Posting my reply from a similar thread: 
If you are very interested, I might recommend a book called “The Early Admissions Game”. Written by two Harvard Professors and one Wesleyan Admissions Dean, it is very well researched and data-driven and they had access to data that was not publicly available.
I found it among the most useful books of the many I (continue to) read on the subject of admissions, and it covers the entire process to some degree.
If you want "Postmodern’s Summary of the Book’s Conclusions"™:
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In most cases, applying Early Decision provides a significant benefit to aspiring applicants to highly competitive schools.
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However, overall the process benefits the schools more than the student, particularly WRT financial aid
Hope this helps.
“the process benefits the schools more than the student”
How did they determine the amount of benefit?
^^^ @vonlost, it wasn’t a single quantitative presentation of that point, but I have the book open and will list the subheadings for chapter 6 “The Game Revealed: Strategies of Colleges, Counselors and Applicants” and a clarifying note on the benefits to the schools:
- Identifying Enthusiasts (applicants who really want to go)
- Reducing Enrollment Uncertainty (our old fave, yield mgmt)
- Minimizing Financial Aid Commitments (presents a case that since they know FA can't be shopped, they can offer less wholesale. They do have some data to support this)
- Improving Selectivity Ratings (USN)
- Competing for Applicants (attract kids who would otherwise have a shot at more selective colleges but play game theory in their applications to be safe)
There are more subheadings but those are the main ones WRT school benefits.
Yes, ED both increases yield and makes yield more predictable.
In terms of financial aid, the school may also be less generous with scholarships or preferentially packaged financial aid, due to lack of need to compete with other schools (it only needs to guess at what amount the student and parents will consider “affordable”). Also, since ED tends to skew the applicant pool toward no-financial-aid applicants who do not mind financial aid uncertainty, that can also reduce the financial aid costs.
@Postmodern, I wonder if the kid who gets admitted ED to her dream school with finances in place and has no more apps to write would agree with the weighting of benefit. Point of view rules, perhaps.
@vonlost I agree with you, and to be clear the book’s main point was that there WAS a very decided benefit to the applicant you describe to apply ED. They were not even against the policy itself, but rather the escalation of the concepts, and they do suggest “some possible reforms” in the book.
But upon completion of it, all I could think was “man I hope my S applies somewhere ED and gets in!”.