I’ve not heard of any school that REQUIRES an early app. I’ve had kids in public, independent, Catholic schools and though they may recommend getting a good early option, they do not require it. Sometimes, it’s all that can be done to make those 12/31 RD deadlines. But it certainly isn’t a big deal to find an early action or rolling admissions school to throw on the list, and make it a test case school, if nothing else.
My oldest son, applied to three EA schools which gave him an excellent idea of where his selectivity rating was. He was accepted at one with an invite to some special program and hints of merit money if he applied for that. Got an accept with no mention of any such thing at another. And he was deferred at the most selective of the three, but not rejected outright. That gave him some real life experience in the college application field that year. He knew that he was at least in the running at the very selective schools. He had a good safety school with a chance of some merit money. And he knew that he had a decent chance with the schools at the selectivity level of that middle school. It cut the number of his apps down considerably for RD, and changed the composition of schools.
One of the best things about an early EA or rolling acceptance is that it eliminates the need for additional safety schools, assuming you like and can afford it. There is nothing safer then a school that has already admitted you.
Being wealthy can definitely have many advantages. You are far less limited in all of your choices. You have a greater choice in where you live, where you vacation, what you drive, where, eat etc. Logic would dictate that you would have a greater choice in where your children attend school. Two things need to happen for a student to be able to attend a university, they must be accepted and it must be affordable. For the wealthy (I’m going to assume wealthy here means they can afford to send their child anywhere) all schools would be deemed affordable so all they need is to be accepted. ED is truly an opportunity for them to use it as it is marketed, allowing a student who has a definite first choice an opportunity to apply to a school and know early whether or not they are accepted and that their college search is complete. They know what they are going to be required to pay and that is taken in to consideration when the application is made. In exchange they agree that they will attend and withdraw all other applications. Pretty straight forward.
The more limited your means the fewer choices you have since costs are an issue. For us there are fewer choices. We have to consider instate schools, community colleges, merit aid, grants and our comfort for loans in our decisions. Our children can still apply anywhere but we are limited by what we can afford not just where our children are accepted. I guess I don’t consider this unfair. I am appreciative of the taxes, the donations and the tuition that wealthy families pay which have aided my students in paying their tuition. I don’t like the cheating ie. the recent scandal, but just being wealthy is not unfair.
Almost all of us agree that Early Decision is indeed quite unfair. It favors admissions of those with hooks, at the expense of mostly middle class families.
What’s not noted so far is that how hypocritical are these private colleges using Early Decision. Their mission statements invariably emphasize inclusivity and equality. They declare to everybody that “they serve all sectors of the society and nation”. Yet, they actually promote the inequality by favoring the rich and connected and using charity to the poorest class to hide this fact.
@leiden The schools do want to bring in the poorest class i.e those that cannot afford the actual list price. They can’t fill the place with the poorest class, because somehow they need to pay the bills. It is not a “right” for any kid to have access to a private college. I personally do believe that all kids should have access to public colleges. The full pay tuition that the student’s parents pay at the privates help offset the costs of bringing the poorest kids to the campus who are contributing less or no tuition. Schools also have endowments that they use at the their discretion for offering need based aid too. Most schools don’t like to drain down endowment funds though, as these funds can be used for things like major construction projects.
I don’t understand the sentiment some people have on CC where they feel entitled to admittance to private schools AND want it for free too.
If schools got rid of ED, the kids with hooks would still get admitted through RD, but the unhooked kids would lose the small boost that applying ED has at some schools.
I’m not sure that those w/ hooks are admitted at the expense of middle class families. There are plenty of hooked URMs, first gen, athletes etc. that get accepted without being full pay.
And of course there’s always the debate about full pay families - a lot of those aren’t uber rich, they are just rich enough not to qualify for aid and a lot of them are the same income level as those shopping around for aid.
@leiden First, hooked applicants (remember that means URM, legacy, athletes) have an advantage in admissions totally separate from ED.
And I don’t find the schools hypocritical. Most are bending over backwards to give FA in an equitable way. Virtually everything else you buy has a fixed price tag; colleges are one of the few places that effectively lowers their price depending on the financial means of the buyer. I’m grateful they do.
Yes, ED often gives an admissions boost, and some middle class families need to weigh merit offers before committing. I get that.
I also beleive colleges genuinely want to accept students for whom it really is their #1 choice even if their stats fell a little below the threshold. And ED is really the only way to demonstrate a student’s true interest (every other method is ripe for gaming.)
We should also remember that ED is meant only for families who determine a school is their #1 choice and NPC indicate it is affordable. If you still need to weigh merit offers to determine the cheapest option, then maybe it wasn’t really the #1 choice.
I actually believe the majority of families like or are at least neutral about the existence of ED.
What exactly does this mean? And who said that admissions to highly selective colleges should be “fair” (however defined)?
Going back to the point posed by the OP:
Perhaps true, but I would posit that the majority of students accepted into highly selective private colleges are wealthy (however defined), regardless of ED or RD. For example, 60% of Colgate students are full pay. Why/how does ED make a difference?
Neither ED nor RD are fair. They have different advantages and disadvantages for different people and serve the institutional needs of private colleges. Seriously, there is nothing fair about any part of our educational system from before a kid is even born.
I am more aggravated about the waitress at the local Waffle House who pays state taxes to support a public university system which she cannot afford to send her kid to, than I am about whether the kids who get into Colgate ED have an unfair advantage over kids who need to compare multiple financial aid offers.
Add up the size of the freshman class of ALL these private colleges the folks on CC get so worked up over- go on, add up Yale and Colgate and Amherst and Swarthmore… and then look at the population of the top five public flagship U’s.
Why aren’t you more upset over the “lock out” of average citizens from their OWN public U’s, and spend your energy worrying about rich kids who play lacrosse and got into Villanova early? Or even worse (from both a human perspective AND a public policy perspective) add up the numbers of kid graduating from high school in places like Camden, NJ or the South Side of Chicago who will have a HS diploma but are reading at a 6th grade level, and don’t know what a decimal point is??? How are those tens of thousands of kids going to get jobs- as a pharmacy tech, an LPN, an auto mechanic-- in our economy where math and reading skills are so basic for any job above flipping burgers??? Do YOU want someone sorting bags of your chemo fluids who doesn’t know the difference between a kilo, a lb, a milliliter? And even if you don’t care- how do you work in a hospital or care facility without those skills???
I do not believe that ED is UNFAIR because it favors admission of those with hooks. On the contrary, it creates a hook. Most of the time, those who apply ED gain that hook by making a commitment for space in an empty room that needs to be filled before the hordes stand in line to fill it. It’s always easier to get something when there is more of it, than when there is a scarcity, and ED starts with most all the class seats empty.
Where ED is most unfair is that kids tend to procrastinate and those who do not have parents or some other aware and interested adult involved in the process are highly unlikely to miss the whole shebang. Those who attend schools where the GCs are way busy with things other than college applications and whose parents have no clue about college applications in general, let alone ED, are going to let the ED deadline go right by. ED is just the tip of that iceberg. A lot of those kids are not even in the realm of applying to colleges even in senior year. So yes, ED is unfair, but so is the whole danged process.
For those lucky enough to have someone knowledgeable who can guide them through the process, ED can provide a distinct admissions advantage for anyone, and I’ve touched on how it can help those who have need in my post above.
Actually, some of the most sought after colleges claim that they spend more per undergraduate than the list price cost of attendance – so even undergraduates paying list price are being subsidized (presumably by endowment earnings, income from other services like research, etc.). It is just that these students result in a lower operating deficit than the students needing financial aid.
Of course, spending so much per undergraduate suggests that these colleges are providing a “luxury class” educational experience, particularly in comparison to public universities that spend much less per undergraduate (“economy class”). It also suggests that if they want to make themselves more accessible to lower income students, they can cut back on some of the “luxury class” spending and redeploy it to financial aid so that they can admit a greater share of financial aid students. It would also reduce the perceived dependence on big donors and the perceived need for development and legacy preferences in admissions.
But then they may not like the reaction from their existing market of top 3-4% SES, or the reaction from other interested parties, including elitist employers who want to recruit from a predominantly high SES student body (with the few low and middle SES students being socialized to high SES norms during their college years).
Many schools do have to measure their financial aid dollars very carefully, especially towards the end of the acceptance process. They only have so much to give. Often times, decisions do have to me made as to how to best spend a given amount of $s. Instead of a full need kid that is going to need $60K+ in grants, every single year, a decision could be made to give 6 candidates $10K in grant money that closes their gaps in need.
So each full pay student leaves more money in the fin aid pot to distribute.
No, the problem extends to many so-called full need schools, because their financial aid policies are very different - in the ways they determine need, in the ways they structure their financial aid, and even in the way they determine COA by factoring in allowances for soft costs, like books, incidentals, travel allowances. Just as one more example, all colleges my kids applied to included either work-study or a campus job as part of the award – but some had very modest expectation ($1500 or less) – and some expected the student to be able to earn much more (around $5000). So that could create a fairly big disparity in costs, given that I also know from experience that it is not always easy for a first-year student to actually find and schedule the job they need to do to earn the money.
You are right that Princeton is a bad example, because Princeton is particularly generous with financial aid – it’s a pretty good bet even without an opportunity to compare aid, Princeton’s likely to offer stronger need-based aid than just about any college.
But it’s a moot point, because Princeton doesn’t have ED – just single-choice early action – so applicants fortunate enough to get accepted at Princeton via SCEA also have the ability to wait until May 1st to make their decision, and compare awards from as many other schools as they choose to apply to. The only thing they are giving up by going SCEA Princeton is the ability to use ED at another school.
The problem is that at full need schools, the actual cost to the student after financial aid can be quite variable. Same student, same financials — but one full-need school will cost that family $15,000 and another will cost that family $28,000.
This isn’t really a problem that impacts the “poor” so much, because they will have a -0- EFC and don’t have the kind of income or assets that result in such inconsistencies. The systematic disadvantage is still there, but it comes from outside factors – such as the fact that such students don’t have access to the same sort of resources in terms of college advising and guidance — and they are far less likely to even qualify for admissions to elite colleges due to limitation in offerings at their high schools.
It is a problem that tends to impact working-class or median income families the most They are the ones who are also going to have a hard time paying even for in-state public options in most states; the students are more likely to be attending suburban public high schools with decent resources— so there was the ability to sign up for AP’s and get on the honors track, and their high school does have reasonable advising — but they are much more likely to have the kind of complicating factors that make it more likely that they will see variance in need-based awards.
Who are you addressing, @blossom ? If it’s me, I work with primarily low-income students. Trust me, that particular kind of unfairness is something I see every day. But that wasn’t this question on this post.
As I’ve said, my own kids have a lot of advantages. That doesn’t mean I can’t see that something is unfair to others, especially with colleges filling up more and more and more of their class with ED/EDII every year.
With the cost of top priced private colleges these days, a lot of middle income families lumped right in there with low income. With costs going over the $70K mark, being able to come up with half that amount still leaves an insurmountable gap. It wasn’t that long ago, that one could afford half the costs, and it was doable with the Direct loans, maybe matching PLUS loans, tightening the belt a bit, and kid gotta work. But that’s not going to close the gaps that today’s sticker prices often make…
The Comments regarding the parents made better life choices. Seriously??? Educated and the noneducated don’t always make the choice, its what they are given. Cancer, layoffs, ill parents, disabled and many other things are not a choice but instead a reality. The teacher who worked endless hours teaching your kid who tend to be paid by profession are educated Yet they are not the folks spending 10k or more on a college coach and the like. So while I really don’t give one hoot about prestigious schools I definitely give a hoot about an education. We know it is unfair as life is unfair but at least be gratitious you are on the other end where 70k a year is no big deal rather than blame the parents for life choices. Even if the parents made a mistake their kids are not at fault for their mistakes. Furthermore, the cost of college is not being reigned in but more elaborate dorms and buildings are being erected at many schools. I don’t need a suite for my kid with its own private bath and a state of the art gym but an education. All this is doing is furthering the divide.
I’ve already posted why the concept of “affordable” (or not) is naive at best. Many families are confronted with an array of options that are all unaffordable— and will have to borrow or use other means to raise money (for example, asking for help from relatives, or pulling money out of a retirement account, or taking a second or even a third job) – so the differentials in cost between one college option or another is very significant. Any option is going to be difficult --so being able to compare awards is a very big deal. And those families may be looking at the ED / full-need schools as the best option they have – so they are not looking at the elites that are known for generous financial aid, but may have their eyes on a smaller LAC where admission is more likely, but there is also a large difference between ED & RD admit rates.
And again – I don’t think that colleges should abandon ED because I just think that the would just find another way to meet their targets for full pay students – many would just go to need-aware admissions. But I do think it should be at least acknowledged that the system is built around giving an advantage to students from more financially privileged backgrounds.
@ucbalumnus - I chuckled at the “luxury class” experience line. After looking at my son’s pretty run-down dorm, experiencing a bathroom in a dining hall with broken stall doors, walking outside and seeing basketball hoops with torn nets, then being in contact with the college about a piece of equipment missing in the dorm that had been there on an earlier visit and learning it had broken and they hadn’t replaced it… my spouse said, “I guess all the money must be going into financial aid!”
The college is very, very generous with its financial aid students (see my earlier posts and also this thread:
What is truly luxurious there, and should be: the educational experience. Top professors, small classes (including tutorials with only two students in them), top opportunities.