<p>I don’t think there should really be a concern about actually getting admitted because ED and EA schools shouldn’t be the only school that you are applying to. I would honestly apply to the school that you think you have the most interest in early. I’d rather have no regrets than play it safe because you can still apply to others even if you don’t get accepted!</p>
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<p>How large is the set of “decent” affordable schools that you (assuming both parent and student) are indifferent between? What level of selectivity relative to the student’s credentials are they?</p>
<p>It seems that you are overthinking this. Within a set of schools that you are truly indifferent to, the goal of the application strategy is to maximize the chance of admission to any one of them. Using ED on a school with a relatively high (but not 100%) chance of admission may be a perfectly valid use of ED here (especially if the student is in the upper range of the school’s frosh profile, but the school considers “level of applicant’s interest”). Of course, applying EA to any of the schools which offers EA increases the chance of an early safety beyond what applying ED may do.</p>
<p>Or is it really the case that you are not indifferent among the set of schools, since you would hate to miss out on the lottery?</p>
<p>OP, since your son already has a safety he really likes, he will end up somewhere “decent”. That’s the toughest part imo of the entire experience. </p>
<p>I’ve had two kids successfully apply Early Decision to their top choice schools–one a private university, the other a LAC. Their essays were absolutely crucial to their acceptances. Standard essay writing advice here on CC and elsewhere is that if your kid drops their essay without their name on the floor at their high school, someone will pick it up, read it, and say “oh, this is [your kid]'s”. There are so many unhooked applicants, all with great stats–the easiest, sometimes only way to stand out is to have an essay that makes your child truly a distinct individual in the admissions folks’ eyes. To be fair, both of my kids wanted schools that stress holistic admissions and which emphasize the essay. You’ll have to suss out which schools on your son’s list, if any, are like that. </p>
<p>D2’s ED experience at a LAC was different than that of MrMom’s kid. There really was an enormous ED admissions bump: overall admission rate was something like 13-14% and ED was between 30-40% for a school that’s no athletic powerhouse. Your mileage may vary. </p>
<p>What does your son’s college counselor have to say about his chances? Knowing how your child’s stats look in relation to others at the school, and how acceptances/rejections played out in earlier years, can be a big help in deciding about ED strategy. For instance, D1’s top choice U was a school where a few students from her high school would apply, but not matriculate if accepted. Far better for her to make it clear via ED that yes, if accepted she’d be attending. </p>
<p>Thanks for the great info on this thread. We are struggling with the same things. S has a high reach dream school versus low reach legacy school that is also fantastic. It is deciding to stack the cards with legacy to become a match versus spreading so both become low reaches. It may help a little that he got a perfect ACT score.</p>
<p>I’ve found that at even at LACs that are not athletic powerhouses, athletics are a powerful admissions component, it just may not be apparent, therefore the ED bump is not as big as it may seem, but it is still there.</p>
<p>Consider your generic NESCAC school, few athletic powerhouses, but they all have teams and they love to win. Say the average class at a NESCAC is 450. One third of students at NESCACs play a varsity sport, so that’s 140 kids. NESCACs also have rules that allow 75-80 “tips” per school, and there are other rules about what those tips can be - basically, there are rules about how far outside of a school’s admissions standards athletes are allowed to go. So half your athletes don’t need a tip, but half do, and a large number of those are going to come in through the ED process. Say 50 of the tips are ED, and you’re letting in 40% of the class through ED. That’s just 190 ED slots, with 50 of those tipped, meaning they apply, they get in. So about a quarter of the ED class had a 100% acceptance rate, and 75% will be competing on close to the normal school standards, which probably means closer to the normal acceptance rate.</p>
<p>If the generic acceptance rate is 25% for the school, and let’s just assume that regular ED students compete at that rate, then the athletic tips getting in at 100% rate (which may not necessarily be true) will drive the ED acceptance rate to close to 45%. That’s actually pretty close to what we see with many schools - which means that ordinary RD students actually are competing on a much lower acceptance rate in order to drive the total acceptance rate down to 25%. That’s really the hidden benefit of ED - RD acceptance rate is actually much lower than the published figures. At least with ED, you get close to the generic rate if you’re an ordinary kid.</p>
<p>OP if you are indifferent I assume that means your student is too, in which case I urge you not to ED! </p>
<p>You can’t imagine how much kids can change in just a matter of months during their senior year. The school that many kids ultimately select may be one that wasn’t even on their radar until very late in the process. </p>
<p>I know it seems like ED may relieve a lot of stress but trust me it will be more stressful later if your son EDs and then wonders if he/she made the right choice. Don’t worry and look at this as an amazing adventure that you can share with him. </p>
<p>I’m really not a fan of ED. Mostly for this reason: </p>
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<p>From an economic, incentive, supply-and-demand perspective, ED means that the school in question is holding all the cards. They know you love them, they know you will attend (almost) no matter what, so there is no incentive for them to woo you with merit aid. This is fine if you’re looking at schools that are need-only, but not so much if you need merit scholarships. Also, by locking into a school ED you lose the ability to compare offers-- there are tons of stories on CC about students who decided to turn down their “dream schools” for full rides or other sizable scholarships from “lesser” schools.</p>
<p>You don’t need to apply any school ED if you have any doubt the school is a good fit or financially affordable for you.</p>
<p>If you want or need money, ED is not the best way to go, because you have no idea what you can get in the market. Those who do want certain schools so much that they do not care if the aid offers are less than optimal, have firm points where it is not a go, and do not care about comparing, that can be fine. When it works out it’s wonderful. I know families who are paying more than planned and expected, but it’s well worth it to them, and they never looked back. Others who picked a school and got in, got little money or none, and then saw peers getting a close second choice getting in RD with some great packages feel more than a pang or two of buyer’s remorse. Members here have clearly stated that even schools that state they use the same methodology for ade (the NESCAC school, for example) have come up $10K a year and more differently from each other, and also when you have offers from like schools, you can open up a discussion about the aid a bit more effectively. It’s often,take it or leave with ED, and you have the big momentum and those puppy dog eyes of your kid on you to say, “yes” when maybe you financially should not. </p>
<p>Agreed that the figures, especially from some of the small, very selective schools are greatly inflated in terms of chances in ED because with such a small pool, once the connected are taken into account and the athletes at those schools that have many good sports teams, there really aren’t that many spots left, and they are not hurting for candidates. They are far enough up on the food chain that they really don’t need the ED like some schools are finding essential. Their yields are good enough that they can wait and pick from the RD round. </p>
<p>However, the panic that ED has caused among a lot of students has made it far more difficult for some schools that would normally be easy admits as ED is the ultimate in demonstrated interest. My son applied to one LAC where the general accept rate looked ok for him about 40 something %. I found out that the RD accept rate was in the 20% range. Big difference. The difference between ED and RD made it a difference between a match school and a reach. </p>
<p>The best way to go if the goal is just to get into the most desirable schools, is to make a list of the schools that you most want to attend. I think for most, getting into any of the three HPY is not going to cause much regret that the other alternatives are out though they do not have ED so it’s no issue. But what are the chances realistically of getting into a school at that level. You go down the list and see where the happy medium lies. It’s a bit of reality check too, when you have to assess how realistic it is for a kid to get into certain given schools, and also if a kid is even interested in a school. My son has let us know that though our alma maters are on the list, he does not want to be locked into them ED. Too bad, as he has a decent chance of acceptance that way, not so much without it. He may not do ED because he really doesn’t have any clear preferences and doesn’t feel like he wants to lock in right now. So it was with most of my kids.</p>
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This sounds plausible in theory, but are there data available to substantiate this claim? In particular, data for meet full-need colleges?</p>
<p>Also I’ve seen plenty of students deferred or denied ED who then go on to get into amazing schools RD - so I don’t believe there is any statistical advantage to applying ED versus RD for any one student. The reason many students do get accepted ED/EA is because they tend to be strong students who have their act together. In other words, as a pool they are generally more highly qualified than most of the students in the RD applicant pool. </p>
<p>I agree. It is a misconception that ED would increase the chance of admission by a certain percentage or the admission stat is lower for ED. It may help for certain students, but it is not for most. Sometimes the admission stat of ED appears slightly lower. That is only due to recruited athletes or students with legacy or hooks. Obviously, there are more than enough well qualified candidates in ED that the school cannot admit everyone. For most students, it may not boost your chance particularly if your credential is below admission average. As far as the school concern, ED students demonstrated their interest to the school and can guarantee the yield. They are not looking for students with lower credential.</p>
<p>I think where ED helped my daughter was that she was a solid candidate for her school in everything but test score. She just has trouble with multiple choice tests, so her test score put her on the 25% line - everything else was more than enough. (With higher test scores, she might have made a higher ranked school, but I’m not sure that would have been a good idea - she’s perfectly happy with what she got and doesn’t feel like she was Ivy material anyway.) I don’t know that ED kicked her into the accept pile, and it may not have, as she seemed to be accepted at some RD schools based on the fact that she had access to accepted students things in her accounts, and she was on the 25% line for some of those schools as well, but we know the test score was less than ideal.</p>
<p>You never know what combination will unlock acceptance to any college, but if you feel strongly about going to a particular school and all the pieces, especially financial, fall into place, adding in the little boost ED provides isn’t a bad idea - you might need it, you might not, but we took the route of doing everything we could possibly do to get her in, short of waiving cash or other goodies at the AOs. YMMV.</p>
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<p>Full need doesn’t matter for a student who doesn’t expect to receive need based aid. The OP hasn’t answered queries about finances, so one might surmise that they are full pay and need based aid doesn’t matter. I haven’t met the parent yet who wouldn’t like to knock $15K or so a year off the cost of college, though. Colleges do not release the stats on which students get merit, but it is obvious from the postings out here every spring about ED results (and just common sense, too) that colleges have no need to offer merit aid to ED students. The student is committed to come to the school if accepted. Why would the college lower tuition for them (which is what merit aid really does)?</p>
<p>Trust me, any meet full-need college that also gives merit aid is carefully calculating how to dole out the merit money they do have. And giving it to ED students makes no sense.</p>
<p>@intparent – Haha, of course I know that some kids do get into Chicago EA. 
My recommendation is not to apply to a top choice early, but to still apply somewhere (ideally a selective EA/SCEA). I think that getting deferred/rejected will give the applicant motivation to improve their regular applications. My applications were better because I was deferred and wanted to get in somewhere regular, not only because I had more time.</p>
<p>I don’t think it has to be ‘ideally’ a selective EA/SCEA. Nothing wrong with a regular old EA or rolling admissions application, too. I don’t know that all students are motivated by deferral or rejection, either. I know kids who have gotten very depressed and panicked after ED or EA rejection – that doesn’t seem like a recipe for strong applications to me. My kids both had an EA acceptance pretty early, and it was a huge relief. But they still worked hard on their apps so they would have good choices in the spring. One ended up attending her EA option (not the U of C kid), the other did not (in fact, she attended the college that sent her very last acceptance, via snail mail on something like March 28).</p>
<p>There are (or were?) a few schools which awarded more merit money ED. IIRC two such schools were Yeshiva University and Muhlenberg. At least this was the case a few years ago. Good idea to check carefully about merit aid policies at all the schools on your student’s list, though this kind of policy is more the exception than the rule.</p>
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<p>I’d rather have my kid have the best possible application from the start. 
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<p>Seriously, this strategy worked for this particular poster, but in general it’s a dangerous way to go. ED/EA results come out in mid-December. RD applications are due as few as two weeks later. That’s not much time to pull yourself back together and write a kick-posterior application. </p>
<p>I just reviewed Muhlenberg’s merit scholarship page, and it does not even hint at this. I would be stunned if it were the official business policy of a college to “award more merit money ED”. Why would they do that? The only reason I can think of is if they were really offsetting need-based aid they would have given anyway with “merit” money to make students feel more special and wanted. But still not sure why they would do that for an ED student. It just makes no sense at all – merit is used to draw students to the school, and ED students are already “snared”.</p>
<p>intparent, not surprised it’s changed, but it truly was Muhlenberg’s policy a few cycles back. At the time they said that they wanted to reward the folks who really wanted to love the school. It was part of their FA FAQ page, which was at that time one of the most forthright. </p>