<p>But you read the rest of that thread, right, nirvana? By and large, there’s one person (who strikes me as completely amoral and self-serving) saying Columbia can’t do anything to you if you go to Oxford instead, and everybody else saying that an ED promise is an ED promise.</p>
<p>It’s true that JHU couldn’t do anything to you if you went to a British university instead. For that matter, JHU couldn’t do anything to you if you went to an American university instead. The enforcement mechanism, such as it is, for ED agreements is a kind of gentlemen’s agreement (if you’ll pardon the gender-specific term) between universities and colleges that they will withdraw their offers of admission if they learn that an accepted applicant has not honored the terms of his or her ED agreement with another institution.</p>
<p>So if you applied ED to JHU, but then went to Cambridge instead, Hopkins couldn’t really do anything to you, and Cambridge probably wouldn’t. But Hopkins could blackball your high school, and universities have been known to do it. They might well say, “The guidance staff at this high school allows students to make ED agreements that they do not intend to honor,” and stop accepting applicants from your school under ED. (Or perhaps at all.) So you could very well be screwing everyone for several classes behind you at your school.</p>
<p>You would also be reneging on a commitment that you’d made. That Dionysus character in the old thread you linked to seems to be sufficiently free of scruples or conscience that this wouldn’t bother him. I couldn’t do it, because it’s fundamentally dishonest. Whether you could do it is ultimately a question for you to decide.</p>