6.8% is even lower than last year’s overall acceptance rate. Understand MIT wants to hold the line – accepting no more than half of its class through EA, I guess the main contributing factor is there are more and more people applying, and it will be a lottery for virtually any applicant from now on.
The policy of not preferentially admitting during EA is really philosophically important to us. I don’t know what to tell people other than what I always have: http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/applying_sideways