OK. A little naive. Learning on the fly. I don’t want to bother my daughter too much. She has a lot on her plate. She’s a Junior and plans to do ED at Northeastern a year from now. But she also wants to do EA at a few schools. But from everything I read a lot of the top schools don’t allow you to do EA… they’re SCEA. Is this true mainly for private schools like Stanford and Harvard ? Thanks
You need to read the rules. Schools that are SCEA will be very clear on whether you can apply early to other schools. But remember…it’s Single Choice…so why would you think you can do ED at another school if your single choice is a SCEA school.
But read their rules…as they vary. Do what they tell you to do.
Regular EA is just regular EA…and doesn’t have restrictions.
There are only four colleges – Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford – that have the program we call “SCEA” (for Single Choice Early Action). That means if someone applies for an early decision from one of those colleges, the applicant is not allowed to apply for an early decision (ED or EA) at any other [private] college. (Their rules are not all identical, and can vary slightly year to year. Some allow early action applications to any public college, some maybe only to a home-state public.) Rolling admissions applications are fine, and applying before a scholarship deadline is fine, too, as long as there is no guaranteed decision before January 1.
Several others have a program that gets called “REA” (for Restricted Early Action). Those colleges – Georgetown and Boston College are the ones I remember – allow you to apply Early Action anywhere (other than the SCEA colleges) at the same time you apply Early Action to them, but do not allow you to apply Early Decision anywhere if you are applying Early Action to them.
The norm for Early Action programs, however, is that you can submit whatever applications you want wherever you want (except applying SCEA to one of the SCEA colleges).
The universal rule with Early Decision programs – those are the ones that are more or less binding on an applicant who is accepted – is that you can only have one Early Decision application outstanding at any time. If you are deferred to the regular admission round (or rejected) by an Early Decision college, your application there is no longer an ED application, and you can apply to one ED II college at that point if you want.
There’s at least four flavors of early.
ED – single choice and binding.
SCEA – single choice and not binding. HYPS.
REA – limited choice and not binding. ND, BC, Gtown.
EA – unlimited choice and non-binding.
The key to this is to recognize that if you are going to apply to two schools early, those applications have to satisfy the rules of BOTH schools.
So if you apply to Penn ED, the only rule Penn has is that you can’t apply binding ED to another school. So Penn doesn’t care if you also apply to Stanford SCEA and ND REA. But the rules at Stanford and ND say that its SCEA/REA rules would be violated by the Penn ED application.
Next, layer in the various exceptions to the various sets of rules – often you can apply non-binding early to state schools (but not privates). Or you can apply early if the early app is required for scholarship consideration.
While you always have to read both sets of rules, ED + EA is usually pretty straightforward. It gets complicated when you start mixing ED, SCEA and REA together.
^Note, BC ended restricted EA a year ago. And after a massive increase in unrestricted EA apps last year, this year they now have ED 1 and 2, no EA.
@RonaldP66 To emphasize what the others said, you will learn everything you need to know about early rules by reading them on each of her colleges’ websites.
Also @RonaldP66 your daughter is currently a HS junior. Whatever you read now could very possibly change between now and when she does her applications in a year or so.
Make sure you read those websites in September 2020.
Only thing I’d add to the answers above is that ED can be a concern if finances are an issue. If your daughter is applying for fin aid, or you are hoping for merit aid, you should look into the implications on both with ED. Lots of information available on this site and others.