It’s still a CHOICE!
My daughter didn’t ED anywhere, despite knowing of the boost.
That’s the KNOWN trade off. Colleges don’t hide that fact.
If the student/family cannot pay, they should decline now. Why drag it out for another week or so to have conversations with the guidance counselor? IMO the family’s financial situation is not the GC’s business. OP can talk to parents (and parents, if they have a financial advisor can talk to them) and if the decision is made, cut the cord and move on.
Colleges like WashU reserve 50% of their class for RD. To say there’s no alternative to ED is false. You get the boost because you make the commitment. If you can’t make the commitment it seems pretty fair that you don’t get the boost. There are 1000’s and 1000’s of kids each year that choose to not apply ED and end up getting in RD.
ED isn’t a contract under basic contract law principles, for lack of consideration. It does not present a legal obligation, period.
The policy question has more than one side. As a matter of ethics/morality, it’s a little hard to swallow guilt-tripping a family into paying what they now realize is unaffordable (according to their own indifference curves) due to their mistake when, at the margin, there would be zero harm to the college if the student doesn’t attend.
As an aside, it’ll be interesting to see whether DOJ asks for the name-sharing records that last spring it requested be preserved at certain colleges, implying a problem with ED name-sharing under the Sherman Act. (Thought: did DOJ’s request itself cause those colleges to alter their actions during this admission season?) There was a recent decision in the context of medical school admission but from what little I saw, any decent DOJ lawyer should be able to distinguish that case.
It is also possible that OP’s parents second language is English. Did anyone from the school sit down with them to explain? I doubt it.
I agree with others that ED should either be revamped or eliminated.
Have a sit down with your parents.
How can an applicant figure out if she needs some extra help? That is the information asymmetry.
Having multiple rounds of admissions with restrictive options is morally incompatible with hiding behind “holistic admissions.”
“The ED rounds are binding and end up with almost 100% yield.“
This is not part of the CDS. Which schools publish this number?
@vinlost it stands to reason that the binding nature ends up with almost 100% yield which obviously is the pay off for the schools.
This is a great list of schools ED acceptance rates and % of class filled with ED, but it based on CDS info and doesn’t say what % of the ED acceptances do ultimately attend. http://www.personalcollegeadmissions.com/early-decision
@chobani2023 - what made you decide to apply EDII? Did you apply somewhere else EDI and not get in? Did WashU encourage you to change your application to EDII to better your chance of admission? Did you decide after a conversation with your family/GC? More information would be helpful to better advise you and not get sidetracked by a discussion on the cost/benefit/opinions about ED in general. Please advise.
OP - feel free to only answer question you are comfortable in doing so. You may identifiable if you should decide to decline your ED, so maybe less is more. I think at this point OP should have a lot of those financial discussions with his parents in order to make a decision that’s right for his family.
I don’t know of any schools that publish this number. There might be some references to it in articles in a school’s student newspaper, for example, or maybe an AO will reference it in a Q and A session here and there.
Many schools budget in their revenue models an 85%-90% yield rate from ED rounds, these estimates are typically based on each school’s historical numbers.
Regarding OP, s/he has answered enough questions, and most high school students don’t have a comprehensive understanding of their parents’ finances. OP has received good advice and now it is a private matter for the family to decide whether or not OP will attend. I couldn’t agree with thumper more in an above post stating something to the effect of ‘the ED police are not coming’.
Well the OP is free to continue to withhold information, but then the advice given is based on supposition and hypothesizing, which has already occurred a lot in this thread. IMO it makes a big difference if the family had a discussion about knowingly changing an app to EDII after an EDI denial vs a student innocently responding to encouragement from a school to do so. This student just registered this screenname a few days ago, and its unlikely they would be identifiable simply if they said they didn’t get into an EDI school (without naming the school). The OP has been logging in but has not posted since yesterday. I think understanding what made the OP decide to apply ED II in the first place (and as opposed to EDI) would help direct on-task responses.
Whether or not ED is “fair” or should be abolished or the rules changed is ,IMO, a separate discussion. Several schools did do away with it several years ago, only to find that other schools did not follow suit, and they then instated EA and SCEA or REA.
Hamilton provides these figures. Of accepted ED I applicants, all attended; Of accepted ED II applicants, six did not attend.
I don’t see OP as withholding info. This is a decision between OP and his/her family (many gave that advice on this thread), and OP has received plenty of guidance regarding the factors to consider, and the logistics and timing of accepting or withdrawing the ED acceptance.
Couldn’t agree more
A better understanding of how the OP came to decide to apply EDII would, IMO be helpful to further understand their understanding of the ED process. IMO choosing to apply EDII uses a different thought/decision process than EDI. The OP likely does not know, and does not need to share, the intricacies of his/her parents finances, but several here are hypothesizing whether the OP and/or his/her parents understood the process and the implication. This is difficult to glean.
The OP mentioned up thread that they did not want to disclose some information (location,IIRC, and perhaps something else… can’t recall).
@merc81 Yep. of the 244 students that applied and were accepted in ED I & II, 238 honored their commitment to attend (98% yield). Somehow all of these applicants understood the ED rules when applying early decision even though they are overly complicated, confusing, and meant to trip up the applicant…???
To the OP, the only thing that changed was her, she has now decided to maybe attend medical school and is concerned with graduate school costs. She had every opportunity to apply RD if csot was an issue but chose the option which would give her the most chances for acceptance (ED). Sometimes you need to live with your decisions.
Washu is a fabulous college, as others have suggested go your first year and see what happens. You are undoubtedly a high stat student who could always transfer after one year. Good luck…
To me, this boils down to whether or not paying for the school constitutes a hardship. Only the OP and his parents know the particulars. It may be that this is a case of high income/high cost of living (where financial strain might be more evident), or high income/low cost of living (easier to swing) or very high income but with second thoughts. Three very different scenarios for which I might offer three very different responses.
This is not the first time that I have seen a situation like this on CC where the parents want make their high achieving child’s dream come true, think they can swing it financially, and only later do they run the numbers for the full four years including annual increases and consideration for other children down the line. How many times have we seen parent or student agonizing over how to distribute resources equally for all children/siblings? I have also seen cases of parents allowing children to apply to unaffordable reaches assuming that they won’t get in and then have to face the reality of coming up with the money.
This is not the first time that I have seen the gap between theory and practice play out, when confronted with the reality of a 280-300K commitment.
Declining Wash U for financial reasons (assuming they are reasonably compelling) should not jeopardize current admission and scholarship offers from public universities that are in place, IMO.
The takeaway here for future applicants is that one should think long and hard about ED. Frank, substantial discussions between child and parents should happen before that decision is made. It sounds like these conversations took place but perhaps didn’t dig quite deep enough.
And that’s why I do not think OP should answer those questions. It’s not for us to judge based on OP’s answer, or forced him to go to the ED school. On the other hand, the ED school may judge him based on his answer. To me it doesn’t matter how OP got here, what matters now is what his family wants to do and if they can’t afford to go through with ED then what’s the best way of unwinding it.
If OP had posted this last Nov or Dec before he applied ED or ED II, I may have been saying something different. I do think ED is a very serious commitment, no one should take it lightly, but spending 300K that they don’t have is even a more serious issue.