<p>Hey, I'm going to be applying to college next year and I was wondering what the difference between Early Decision and Early Action is. </p>
<p>I read somewhere that Princeton has both ED and EA. Is this true?</p>
<p>My understanding is that ED is binding and EA is not binding. Also, since Princeton allows you to choose between the two, would applying ED be more advantageous than EA? </p>
<p>By advantageous I mean increasing your chance of getting in.</p>
<p>ED is binding, and Princeton uses it.</p>
<p>COlleges that use EA generally limit it to one, so it's basically ED.</p>
<p>You have a better chance... instead of competing against 10K students you compete against maybe 3000</p>
<p>Check today's Daily Princetonian. Princeton is considering switching to Single choice early action for next year. FYI</p>
<p>Read the Early Admission Game by Avery et al. The authors claim the advantage of any Early admission program is the statistical equivalent of a 100 points on the old SAT1 (significant).</p>
<p><a href="http://www.dailyprincetonian.com%5B/url%5D">www.dailyprincetonian.com</a></p>
<p>so why is ea so much better?</p>
<p>it's the smae thing it seems...</p>
<p>It is not the same thing. Most ea's are single choice ea which means you are only applying ea to that school only. The school thinks you are very interested in it and not in its two or three main competitors. You have foregone the early round of applications at the brand x and brand y schools. Accordingly, the admission rate is higher resulting in a high yield for the school. For example, Princeton has a almost a 30% acceptance rate in the early round (with ED) with almost a 100% yield. That rate plunges to under 10% acceptance in the regular round with a 60% yield and is approximately a 11% acceptance rate overall. I would expect Pton's early round applications to jump next year if it goes to SCEA as it did at Stanford and Yale when they made the switch a few years ago. ED got the most committed applicants to apply early. Now more indecisive applicants will join the early round if SCEA.</p>
<p>HYS are the only SCEA schools. </p>
<p>There are over 100 "pure" or "open" EA schools - including Georgetown, Boston College, Notre Dame, Chicago, MIT and Caltech.</p>
<hr>
<p>You misstate the RD yield rate at Princeton, which was only a little over 50% last year. For the Class of 2009, Princeton numbers were based on a projected yield rate of 52% for the RD admits.</p>
<p>SCEA is lame</p>
<p>EA is lame overall because if you apply early to a school, and get in, THAT'S where you should go. Not because you want to cheat the system and get a "better" chance or any of that jazz. It drives me nuts, seeing the ppl on the HY boards etc. who got in EA but then kept applying to schools, because you are taking away an EA spot from someone who WANTS it.</p>
<p>ED for shizzle</p>
<p>and I also know people who apply EA and get in and know they are going there. . . .</p>
<p>and then they still keep applying RD just to see how many other schools they can get into and turn down</p>
<p>not cool</p>
<p>ED is just a bad policy because if you are accepted you have to pay whatever the schools decides you should pay. SCEA and even better EA schools allow you to apply early but decide on which school later so you can also compare financial aid.</p>
<p>As Byerly points out, only HYS are SCEA but I expect that to change over the next few years . . . unless yield becomes less important in the overall equation.</p>
<p>But if you know you'll have trouble paying the tuition, you can most likely get out of the ED agreement. I've heard of some people who have done that.</p>
<p>The problem with open EA is that if were to become more widespread amongst colleges then it would make the January 1 regular deadline obsolete as more and more kids would make more and more applications early to schools of their choice.</p>
<p>So if you honestly don't think that Princeton, the best financial aid school in the NATION, is going to be giving you enough aid, don't apply ED. If you're doing SCEA just to get an early response and then start negotiating aid, you're doing it for the wrong reasons.</p>
<p>The thing is, ivyboy, only a couple per year back out of the binding ED for financial reasons. If you request more, who can say you need it? You can, but who is going to believe you? They're going to say, according to our math, you can pay this. What can you do? No I can't, you can say, then you can forfeit your acceptance to your first choice school, and then you can feel crappy for a while.</p>
<p>I prefer EA, because you can still apply to your first-choice school and still try to get the best offer. BUT, I wish there would be some way to prevent EA acceptees-and-attendees from applying and getting accepted to other schools RD that they won't be attending. What if someone who applies EA could apply to all the EA schools he wanted but could not apply anywhere RD? All schools would then be required to offer an EA round, or a rolling round ending November 1. There could be two rounds: an EA round (not single-choice, though) and an RD round. That would prevent a Yale early action admit from applying and getting accepted to Princeton and Stanford RD, taking spots while knowing in advance that he wouldn't be attending.</p>
<p>"There could be two rounds: an EA round (not single-choice, though) and an RD round."</p>
<p>The problem, then, as someone mentioned before, is that the RD round would basically cease to exist, and people would just do everything EA, making all the deadlines earlier and completely defeating the purpose of early anything.</p>
<p>Increasingly, top applicants ARE abandoning the RD round, since the odds of admission are so drastically reduced for those who wait until then.</p>
<p>RD is rapidly becoming the "second choice" or "losers" round - for those not admitted early to the school of their choice.</p>
<p>At HYP, for example - two-thirds to 3/4 of all members of the freeshman class come from those who applied early - either as initial early admits or those who applied early, were deferred, and then admitted later.</p>
<p>This astounding stat is downplayed by the schools for obvious reasons: they don't want to discourage people from applying RD. When applicants realize that nearly 3/4 of the class comes from the early pool which is only 1/4 as large, they (or their admissions counsellors ) know what they must do: </p>
<p>APPLY EARLY .... SOME PLACE .... ANY PLACE!!!</p>
<p>wow thanks for the info everyone</p>
<p>The numbers are that high, especially for ED schools, because the people WANT to go there. So the applicants are ostensibly (is that the right word?) of a higher quality. If you aren't HYP material, you aren't going to get in no matter /when/ you apply.</p>
<p>I find the RD yield rate the best measure of people's degree of enthusiasm for a particular school ... in addition to the cross-admit yield rate, of course.</p>
<p>Byerly, agreed on response #16. Thus the reason I prefer open EA or perhaps SCEA if need be but not ED.</p>
<p>However, I disagree with #19 because of #16. If the school defers a student to the later RD round then accepts them they already know that the school is one of the students first choices and can manipulate yield. Though I do agree that it would be a better measure than overall yield because there is more choice associated with the actual decision than ED.</p>
<p>BTW, can you site the source of your info for response #16. It seems intuitively correct but I have not seen any hard data on that topic.</p>