Now that we know that EA1 applicants (in-state) at GaTech didn’t increase, all the increase was in out-of-state EA2. So a 20% increase in EA2 applications.
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Yes, it helps the schools, to a point. I think ED, EA and even rolling admissions are a good strategy for colleges. ED for obvious reasons, but I know from personal experience with my S that an early acceptance significantly reduced the number of colleges he was going to apply to. That is good for everyone, for the most part. The schools that accepted my S have less competition to get him to attend, and the schools he didn’t apply to, especially the more “safety” type schools, don’t have to waste an acceptance on someone that is not going to attend.
The one place that may not be as clear cut is for the top 40 schools, especially the prestige privates. They want lots of applications for reasons discussed elsewhere on this board. I can see someone that already has an acceptance to a school they like throwing a few applications at Ivies or some other T20 school, but all the EA and rolling acceptances this year may impact how many people apply RD to schools ranked 20 to say 40. My S is really focused on rankings despite my best efforts, and even he decided it wasn’t worth it to apply to 4 schools RD that were in that range given the acceptances he already has.
Put another way, it will be a pretty high hurdle for some kids to fill out an RD application if they already have a few acceptances they like. I have no idea what that gap has to be, but maybe it is 40 spots in the ranking, or it is not worth their time. If they have an acceptance to a school ranked around 50, they won’t bother applying RD unless it is a T10 school. Maybe that gap is 30. I kind of doubt that a kid is going to burn a lot of cycles to apply RD to a school that is only marginally higher ranked. By definition, the schools that a kid is waiting to RD to apply to are often not going to be a kid’s “dream school”, because if a school was the kid’s “dream school”, the kid would have already applied ED or EA and either be accepted or not.
I would not be surprised if the RD pool at the T20 or T40 is quite a bit weaker given all the EA activity at the large public schools this fall. I would also expect higher yields at the T25 publics given how much early activity they are having.
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Princeton alum here: I completely agree with the criticisms regarding this disappointing decision. It undermines rational informed decision making and it falsely implies Princeton is doing this out of concern for the student population.
Princeton sees itself as in its own race with Harvard, Yale and Stanford and maybe MIT. Its decision to withhold the EA application data has nothing to do with anxiety and everything to do with maintaining its reputation. At the very least, Princeton should eliminate deferrals if it isn’t willing to publicly announce how many students have been deferred and how many it plans to take during the RD round.
Since Princeton is clearly collecting this information even if it isn’t announcing it, I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the future, certain feeder high schools and their counselors receive and share information about Princeton’s early-round stats. (“I’m hearing rumors Princeton filled 40 percent of its class this year …”). If so, the information will be invariably incomplete and unverifiable. And because only some schools/counselors will have access to it, Princeton’s public silence will reinforce inequality and information asymmetries.
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I agree that hiding admission stats only serves university purposes. Schools who say that this is a “student centered decision” are not being honest, in my opinion. My daughter is a freshman at Princeton and her first response to this information was that Princeton is trying to guard against their rankings dropping a couple of years from now when they open 2 new residential colleges and take a much larger freshman class, which will result in their acceptance rate increasing. She thinks they won’t want to publicize increased acceptance rates because it makes Princeton “look bad” so they are deciding now not to publish acceptance rates at all so they can hide behind that decision in a couple of years when their acceptance rate will likely climb. I totally applaud Princeton for increasing enrollment because there are so many kids who could thrive there who don’t get a chance to attend, but it would really bother me if my daughter were right. Admissions is so perplexing and stressful and fraught (I have a high school senior who is going through it now too), and it is hard to see how reducing transparency is the right decision.
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