<p>Thanks Menloparkmom! Yeah, I do remember looking at this page a while ago. Fortunately, ranking is not a problem for me at all. I am definitely at the top of my class but it’s my ACT score that’s a barrier right now. I just took it again this weekend, though. So hopefully all will turn out for the best. If my ACT score doesn’t improve, I may reconsider applying ED.</p>
<p>collegechecker, all those stats tell you are that a much higher % of ED students are accepted. They tell you nothing at all about the relative competitiveness of the ED and RD applicant pools and whether or not “unhooked” ED applications (that is excluding recruited athletes, legacies, and development admits) actually get a boost – much less how big a boost. Without knowing that, you can not say it’s “a huge advantage” because you have no proof.</p>
<p>universities publish middle 50% SAT range. Has anyone seen this for the ED acceptance only?</p>
<p>Better yet, “unhooked” ED acceptance data for middle SAT 50% will answer the question once and for all. I am sure colleges compile this data for the internal analysis purpose. I wonder if they ever make this data available to others.</p>
<p>I’ve never seen that midrange test data for schools my kids have been interested in. The best source I’ve found for actual numbers on ED is a good college newspaper. That’s how I figured out that ED acceptances at Dartmouth are largely filled by athletes and legacies - and presumably URMs, though I don’t recall seeing numbers of URMs for ED. If you get (or can estimate) those numbers of hooked applicants being admitted, the chances for an unhooked applicant - even with perfect test scores - go right down to the normal RD level. In other words, Consolation is correct.</p>
<p>^^That’s exactly the problem. It stands to reason that colleges do compile that sort of data, but they just don’t ever release it to the general public. All they give is the profile for ALL admits (or else, all enrolled) – with RD and ED combined. That’s why everyone is always speculating on CC as to whether or not ED does give a boost.</p>
<p>(FauxNom snuck in while I was typing. This was in response to hyeonjlee)</p>
<p>MIT gives some of the numbers, but they don’t give scores or GPA for the two different groups.
[MIT</a> Admissions: Admissions Statistics](<a href=“http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/apply/admissions_statistics/]MIT”>http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/apply/admissions_statistics/)</p>
<p>But it’s even worse than I remembered - if you look they admitted 540 early plus another 299 EA kids were admitted after being deferred. That’s 839. They accepted 1057 in all. So that means only 218 were admitted that waited till the regular deadline. Implication is that it’s a strong group that applies early I think.</p>
<p>mathmom,</p>
<p>You interpreted the stat wrong. Total 1057 were admitted during the RD. This number does NOT include those already admitted during EA, though it includes those who were deferred from EA.</p>
<p>this means that among those who ONLY applied to RD, 758 were accepted. NOT 218 you mentioned above. You made a mistake of thinking that those admitted during the RD (1057 of them) included those already accepted during the EA cycle (540).</p>
<p>The total accepted is 1675, that’s 1057 accepted during the RD cycle (including those deferred from EA) plus those accepted in Dec (540) plus those from the wait list (78).</p>
<p>The acceptance rate of EA is: 11.5%, during RD (including those deferred from EA) is 10.33%. there seems to be small boost for EA, but negligible. For the RD acceptance rate calculation, you must add those who got in from the wait list, so the formula is total 1057 from those accepted from RD and 78 those accepted from wait list divided by total pool of RD selection process (10980). acceptance rate for RD including those deferred from EA: (1057+78)/10980 = 10.3%.</p>
<p>I am not surprised that there is no acceptance rate boost for EA, especially unrestricted EA like MIT’s and Cal Tech’s.</p>
<p>The difference in EA vs. RD for MIT is not terribly significant – when S applied (class of '12), RD had a higher acceptance rate than EA – low 12s RD vs. 11.3 EA.</p>
<p>At S1’s school (math/science specialty program), the stronger candidates tended to apply MIT EA. In this particular scenario at this school, “stronger” means that many of these students had already earned some significant awards by the time EA deadlines rolled around. Given the nature of the program, the grades and scores were already there.</p>
<p>At S1’s school, not many went for ED. They liked to see all the data. At S2’s school, I think folks are a bit more pragmatic and want to get into a good school and be done with the admissions process. (Given the senior IB workload at this program, I suspect sheer fatigue plays a role, too.)</p>
<p>Actually, it also depends on the individual student as to whether ED is a big advantage or not. If the student has an unusual but interesting background, not the normal range of achievements, the adcom may take a chance on them if they are sure to attend through ED.</p>
<p>I think a number of alumni children apply ED to Cornell, and that quite a few get in. No way to know if there really is a boost. I have no data points where even slightly lesser stats than the norm got in ED. One advantage that no one mentioned yet is the much smaller pool of ED applicants, which at least would give the chance for a review of the application before battle fatigue sets in when the regular pool of many more thousands is reviewed. As a personal matter if the school is truly a first choice or a choice that is totally satisfactory (i.e. would love Yale, but could be happy with JHU or Cornell) ED is a good idea. </p>
<p>I would encourage a student to apply ED to a school that they would really like to attend, unless they have doubts about it if selected.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Same here with D and NYU. </p>
<p>According to Naviance, the students from D’s HS who applied ED to NYU had a much higher rate of acceptance, however those students also had significantly higher grades and test scores.</p>
<p>You’re right, I missed that top line with the total accepted. It’s still a large percentage of the class that was accepted early - but closer to what I remembered. The point is that even though the acceptance rate is similar for both groups a large portion of the class applied early. (32% if you assume all the deferred students were rejected, but if you assume a 10% acceptance rate for those defered another 300 of the deferred kids would be accepted in the regular round, right?) That gets you to the half of the freshman class originally applied early number which is what I remember.</p>
<p>If:
- The numbers certainly look like it’s a boost
- The colleges state point blankly on their website that it’s a boost (see post #11)
- They tell you to your face it’s a boost
(as one LAC admissions officer did at an info session I attended)</p>
<p>Then I, personally. accept that it’s a boost. At a number of schools, some moreso than others.</p>
<p>YMMV.</p>
<p>The LAC adcom said that nominally if you look at scores & grades the two pools don’t look that different. But if you dig deeper into the applications, the bar is substantially higher for the RD admits.</p>
<p>We can all guess about the impact of hooks on ED scores, but few schools will ever disclose it, for fear of embarassment over any gaps. My own guess is that more athletes would apply RD because they want to compare scholarship offers (even at places which do not give athletic scholarships); coaches want to see Fall athletes (and football players are a huge % of athletes) perform as seniors; Fall athletes want to see how college teams do in the Fall to gague their chances vs. returning athletes; etc</p>
<p>With legacies, there are those who go ED because either they have wanted to go there since birth or need the ED boost, but others aim higher, thinking legacy gives them a fallback. There are also schools which offer nonbinding ED to legacies; a best of both worlds.</p>
<p>URMs, as another guess, would benefit from RD so they can compare aid offers.</p>
<p>And, to add to Monydad’s post, if the CDS shows a MUCH higher admission rate for ED applicants, especially at non-ivy/top 20 schools…the numbers don’t lie</p>
<p>EA vs. ED is totally different dynamics. EA schools get many more early applications, so the admission rate tends to be much closer to the overall rate than at the ED schools, who get a comparatively small percentage of their overall applications early. That’s why MIT has essentially the same rate for both.</p>
<p>To add a bit to some of the foregoing:</p>
<p>I think the answer re ED is “all of the above”. I believe there is an advantage in applying ED, not only because admissions staff say there is – they have every incentive to say it, since there is CLEARLY an advantage to the college if people apply ED – but also because it makes objective sense. I also believe, however, that the apparent advantage displayed by the gross admissions percentages is overstated to some extent, and that a large portion of the higher admissions rate has other explanations.</p>
<p>First of all, at most of the colleges we are talking about, athletic recruiting accounts for a significant portion of ED admissions. The admission rate on athletic recruits is probably somewhere between 90-100%. To analyze the ED advantage properly, the athletic recruits (and other special recruits) should really be backed out and considered a separate pool.</p>
<p>Secondly, I believe that at most colleges the ED pool IS stronger than the RD pool. Sure, the strongest potential Cornell applicants may be unwilling to apply ED to Cornell because they are applying SCEA to Yale, or EA to MIT and waiting to see if they get lucky at Harvard. And strong students who feel they need to compare financial aid offers aren’t applying ED. But the bottom whatever percentage of the Cornell applicant pool also isn’t applying ED, either. And there are certainly very strong applicants who for whatever reason – family tradition, risk aversion, falling in love with a particular college – will forgo the opportunity to apply to Harvard in favor of applying ED elsewhere. My hypothesis is that the median / average ED applicant would probably be somewhere in the middle of the 50-75% range of RD applicants, or put another way that the ED pool looks like the enrolled student pool, while the RD pool both has more people at the high end and is weaker on average. (To some extent, this can be almost a mathematical certainty. Applications that are not complete at the ED deadline will be accounted for as RD applications; if they are never complete, they will probably be accounted for as rejected RD applications, not taken out of the denominator altogether.)</p>
<p>Cutting the other way, I believe the reported ED admission rates actually understate the real ED advantage, because they do not include applicants who were deferred ED and admitted RD.</p>
<p>I am going to make up some numbers to illustrate these points. Imagine Match U., which aims for a class of 1,000. It plans to admit 500 students ED, from 1,500 ED applicants (500 of whom will be rejected, 500 deferred), and then to admit 1,500 students RD from 9,500 RD applications (plus 500 deferred EDs). Its reported overall admission rate is 18.2%. Its apparent ED admission rate is 33.3%, about twice its apparent RD admission rate of 15.8%. ED applicants are actually accepted at a 38.3% rate, and RD applicants are actually accepted at a 15% rate, so the ED admission rate is really about 150% higher than the RD admission rate.</p>
<p>How many kids are we talking about? 575 ED applicants are admitted, and if it were all one pool the average would be 275. So, 300 extra kids.</p>
<p>How many of those are recruited athletes? 100? 200? Probably a lot closer to (or higher than) the latter, but I’ll use 100 for purposes of analysis, since some of them would have gotten in anyway. So now we have 200 extra kids (75 of whom wound up being admitted RD), and their admission rate is 34%. Now lets assume that the ED pool doesn’t really have anyone equivalent to the bottom 20% or so of the RD pool. So the “real” background admission rate isn’t 18.2%, it’s 22.2%. That means that in a single pool the expected number of kids admitted from the ED group would have been about 335, not 275, and the number of “extra” ED non-athlete kids is 140. That’s just 10% of the ED applicants. Most of whom may actually have been admitted RD.</p>
<p>That’s a much smaller advantage. The real background rate excluding non-serious or incomplete applications, and excluding athletes, is about 21%, and the real ED admission rate excluding athletes is 34%.</p>
<p>To the admissions staff, that feels huge. They know they may be taking a risk on about 10% of the ultimate enrolled class. But for an applicant? It means that there’s only about a 10% chance – Russian roulette odds – that applying ED will make a difference in the outcome of his or her application.</p>
<p>D isn’t looking at Ivies or near-Ivies, but her top choice school’s stats are:</p>
<p>Overall admit rate: 43%
(female admit rate 39%, male admit rate 47%)
ED admit rate: 75%</p>
<p>As a female applicant who is convinced that this school is her top choice, she’d be crazy not to apply ED. </p>
<p>I haven’t heard this school give their reasons for the higher ED rate. I’ve heard several other schools claim that the stats for their ED kids are significantly stronger than for their RD kids and that explains the difference. But in most cases, I’m not really buying that.</p>
<p>BTW, Boston College has a reputation for being harder to get into ED than RD. A friend’s daughter’s Catholic high school that sends a large number of kids to BC every year warns their students that only VERY strong candidates should apply ED to BC. Every year, kids ignore the warnings, and every year they are shocked when they are turned down. So there are schools where it works the other way.</p>
<p>OTOH, Northeastern is widely known for admitting early. I’ve seen multiple posts on CC where examples are given of kids with lower stats being admitted and kids with higher stats being rejected from NEU. The difference - the lower stats kids applied EA, the higher stats kids applied just before the final deadline. If you like NEU, apply EARLY.</p>
<p>Lafalum, according to BC’s site they don’t have an Early Decision program, only Early Action. It makes complete sense that the bar for EA admission would be higher than for RD, because the college doesn’t gain anything by admitting students EA. In fact, BC is explicit about this on their site: “Because it is impossible to gauge the size and quality of the applicant pool at this early stage, admission is more selective for Early Action than during the Regular Admission period.”</p>
<p>I think people are overstating the ED impact of recruited athletes and understating the effect of legacies. For example, Stanford has approximately 750 male and female athletes on its scholarship (Title IX) sports rosters. Assuming an even distribution of athletes over the four classes that works out to 175 per class. That’s 175 out of 2,400 applicants offered admission. </p>
<p>First of all, not all athletes are recruited, in many of the secondary sports they rely on walk-ons to fill rosters. Second, coaches are not allowed free reign to bring in any athlete they choose. Typically coaches are given a few “passes” each year. These passes allow them to identify a small subset of athletic recruits that they want admitted regardless of their academic records. The remaining recruits do get a boost up in admissions, but they have to at least be in the ball park of the overall class, (25th%-tile?). So while athletes may be lowering the overall academic averages of ED applicants they aren’t quite as far off as you might think.</p>
<p>The biggest impact on the ED pool seems to me to be from legacies. This seems to vary widely from school to school. Penn is notorious for promoting ED while MIT used to be very stingy (allegedly). The only detailed numbers I’ve ever seen pertain to Dartmouth. I’ve included the link below.</p>
<p>The gist of the article is that at Dartmouth at least, the ED class has an academic profile very similar to that of the overall class. To me ED is a viable option if you’re moderately comfortable with the idea of attending a given school, don’t want/need to compare financial aid packages AND are at least around the 50th%-tile statistically of recent admitted classes.</p>
<p>[TheDartmouth.com</a> | 401 members of Class of 2013 admitted early](<a href=“http://thedartmouth.com/2009/01/05/news/ed]TheDartmouth.com”>http://thedartmouth.com/2009/01/05/news/ed)</p>