<p>Thank you Northstarmom. I really appreciated that explanation. Now I think I can decide my EA college better :) Can you explain why there such a huge difference between the EA and RD admit rates?</p>
<p>There actually seems to be a lot going on with this subject in the last one or two years. I haven't had time to really research it but colleges are switching from ED to Single Choice Early Action and it is having effects. For some colleges, some of the benefits of ED are bleeding into SCEA as SCEA replaces it. The traditional reason given for why ED had better acceptance percentages was that colleges wanted to keep their yields up even at the cost of accepting lower stats. The colleges switching from ED to SCEA have high yields anyway, but the fact they are switching is changing the landscape. </p>
<p>For example, Stanford and Harvard both switched, and an interesting article is at:
<a href="http://daily.stanford.edu/tempo?page=content&id=12642&repository=0001_article%5B/url%5D">http://daily.stanford.edu/tempo?page=content&id=12642&repository=0001_article</a></p>
<p>It says among other things that as a result of the switch:</p>
<p>"Stanford invited 800 students last month to join the Class of 2008, compared to the 596 early decision applicants admitted last year. Yet the early acceptance rate actually decreased from 24 percent to around 20 percent due to the high number of applicants."</p>
<p>and </p>
<p>"Harvard, which switched from an early action to single-choice early action program this year, saw a drop of over 47 percent in the number of applicants. Harvards early acceptance rate increased from 15.1 percent last year to 23.3 percent this year"</p>
<p>I would look at it on a school by school basis and I wouldn't even assume that it is going to be the same this year as last year. Good luck.</p>
<p>A good article is: "Is Early Still Better?" at
<a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5626555/site/newsweek/%5B/url%5D">http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5626555/site/newsweek/</a></p>
<p>Due to a lot of criticism of ED, Yale and Stanford switched from ED to SCED in 2003. Harvard followed shortly thereafter. Proponents of ED say that the best students apply early and that students applying early are strongly committed to a particular college. Critics of ED say that colleges are using ED to lock up 30-50% of their freshman classes so as to improve yield projections, that high school students are being forced to use ED as an application strategy in order to be accept to extremely selective colleges, that ED applicants are statistically less qualified than RD applicants (according to the colleges' own stats), and that ED disadvantages minorities who can't afford to take the financial aid risks. Since Yale, Stanford and Harvard switched; there was hope that ED would go away or be deemphasized by the colleges. Currently, the effect of SCED is being examined.</p>