Idea to stop the vicious cycle of ever-increasing college admission competitiveness

[ucbalumnus]

@DeepBlue86

there is (and should be) an explicit “get out of jail free card” if a student gets into a school early and isn’t offered adequate financial aid by the deadline to submit regular applications elsewhere.

For many students needing financial aid, they need to compare offers, since they could make “barely affordable” work but would strongly prefer “easily affordable”, so that any sort of binding ED, or high school policy that forces them to treat EA as binding ED, would prevent them from applying early.

@DeepBlue86

There also is (and should be) an exception for schools with rolling admissions - you can apply early to any number of those in addition to your binding early application. I think this is fair and preserves a lot of options for applicants.

There are also non-super-selective schools which offer EA that is not rolling.

@DeppBlue86

I don’t have a lot of sympathy, though, for a student who wants to lock down a safety early and then collect acceptances from a lot of other schools. Applying early provides a clear statistical advantage - why waste that on a school you’re likely to get into anyway (particularly since you can also apply somewhere with rolling admissions that’s in your safety zone, if you really, really need to know as early as possible that, yes, you’re going to be able to go to college)?

Would you object if a student used a school like UMass - Amherst as a probable safety and applied EA there, while also applying to other schools higher on his/her desirability list even if s/he got admitted to UMass - Amherst during the EA round? Would you force such a student to treat UMass - Amherst as ED in this case?