Hi. Any thoughts on ED? My son will be a senior in the Fall and isn’t sure yet of a first choice school. Does having a hook make regular decision a reasonable idea? I know many of his classmates feel they must apply ED or they will have no shot at acceptance at competitive schools.
Stay in your lane – don’t worry about what everyone else is doing. Find some EA or rolling admission schools so he can have some pressure taken off by having an acceptance in hand early while he waits for RD results. Make sure he has a solid list of match, reach, and safeties (where he is pretty sure to get in, you can afford, and he would like to attend). Then he can make final visits to his top choices he is accepted to and be confident in his decision.
It doesn’t always work out this way, but my D2 got in everyplace she applied – all EA or RD (in spite of a soft GPA, made up for in other areas). Patience worked in her favor. Do what works for your kid & family.
You mentioned a hook. What is it?
With your son having no first choice school yet, I would not do ED. I work with students and they change their minds, better to do EA. Even with SCEA schools like Stanford you can apply to other schools to trigger merit deadlines.
The ED acceptance numbers are better than RD but only really matter if finanicial aid is not an issue and the student clearly has the ED school as #1 on their list. Although being Latino does help, it only helps to a degree. For example a middle-class to upper class Latino is not going to get the same hook as a lower-class Latino and all of the students have to have great grades and test scores. (e.g. A C Latino student is not going to get accepted ED to the ivies.) My own children did not have gpas over 4.0 and test scores over 2000 but they were good students with interesting EC’s. They applied just about everywhere EA and rolling decision so come December they had a lot acceptances and merit money. Being Latino did help them in those instances because the EA schools were trying to increase the number of Latinos students at their colleges. My children did very good applications and essays, participated in diversity fly-ins and demonstrated interest to the latino recruiters at their colleges so that the admission staff knew my children really wanted those colleges.
Thank you very much for your responses. This is all new to us and we are just trying to understand the process. My son’s hook is that he is Hispanic. 32 on ACT, has good grades, takes AP classes, honors, etc. lots of EC community service, a sport. Nothing crazy but a solid applicant I would think. He is working on fly in applications now. He is middle class and does need financial aid so that has always been my concern with ED.
My eldest DD never had a “dream school” and applied EA and RD.
My youngest DD had a very good, affordable college she kept comparing all the others to so I suggested she apply there ED which she did.