<p>This morning, I wrote, </p>
<p>“The suggestion that ED applicants are simply better is absurd. The data I’ve seen indicates that the the average grades and scores of RD applicants are significantly lower and the acceptance rates are significantly higher.”</p>
<p>I hope it was clear that I meant that the average grades and scores of <em>ED</em> applicants are lower while the ED acceptance rates are higher. Sorry if there was any confusion about that!</p>
<p>Looking at the NYT’s Choice blog’s list of early admission outcomes, a couple of schools offer both Early Decision and Early Action.</p>
<p>Elon admitted 51.34% of nonbinding early action applicants. 84.92% of binding early decision applicants.</p>
<p>Babson admitted 32.75% of EA, but 43.36% of ED applicants.</p>
<p>Yield comes into play. The University of Chicago has filled 98% of its freshman class with early action admits, and Fordham has filled 327% of its freshman class. I think they’ll be admitting students in the RD round as well. </p>
<p>Being able to commit to attending gives applicants an advantage. Without the early round, I predict we’d see the admit rates in the regular rounds decrease for the most selective colleges, while the waitlists would increase. No one wants to risk admitting three times more students than dorm beds.</p>
<p>If there were no ED round, applicants would send colleges “first choice” letters. They already do in the New York private school rat race.</p>
<p>I don’t think ED is immoral - that’s quite a stretch. Colleges are a business. If they want to give an advantage to someone who is willing to give them an early commitment, so be it. My D didn’t apply to any school ED because we don’t buy into the “dream school” thing. There were any number of schools that could have provided her a great education and been a good fit. She applied to 5 of them (including some that were safeties for her) and would have been perfectly happy to attend any of them. That takes any ED angst right off the table.</p>
<p>Immoral? No. Unfair, IMO, yes. But so are many things in life. The biggest problem with ED is that most families, students, counselors don’t fully get the drawback, ramifications of it and get caught up in the momentum of the whole thing. Then under the push of the Big Mo, parents find themselves looking into those puppy dog eyes of their darling child who so wants to go to that school, and make a commitment to it when it really was unaffordable and there was better out there. It’s not an informed decision when you have a much wanted, much touted bird in the hand with no idea which ones in the bushes would be so much better. Few people get how fin aid packages can vary from even like schools. It’s not as simple as yes, or no for some people when family finances are tight.</p>
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<p>Or it can be turned upside down. The biggest problem might very well be that hordes of students who could benefit from ED are advised to stay away from it for illusory reasons. This is especially true for the very or zero EFC students who are told by the poorly educated and poorly trained adults around them that ED is only for the rich. </p>
<p>All in all, the biggest problem in the college application process is the vast disparity in being properly advised and educated about the entire process. That is why organizations such as Questridge and perhaps Posse have become more important than ever. </p>
<p>There are drawbacks and pitfalls in the ED process, but there are also solid benefits. Just as there are in the RD round. Nothing is black on white!</p>
<p>Xiggi, is there some pct of total freshman seats filled by ED that, if it were reached, you would take it to be an unfortunate development? I.e., if most of the top and second tier schools filled, not 40%, but 90% of their freshman classes with ED would you then be alarmed–or would it still seem OK to you?</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
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<p>It is much more complicated than this to quantitate any advantage given to ED applicants. All the recruited athletes apply ED as do many other hooked students so for the non-hooked strong applicant, the ED boost may be much less impressive. EA is a whole different bird but dean of admissions there has repeatedly said that no one is admitted to Yale SCEA who would not have been admitted RD. The stats on the SCEA students are clearly stronger than those in the RD pool and even hooked applicants like legacies have higher stats than the non-legacy students accounting for some of their admissions boost. I would agree that ED gives some admissions boost but does not imply the benefits suggested by this UPenn sample. Because the ED group is typically more affluent and has less negotiation power for FA, the institutions spend less FA on the group per capita. If they want to give an admissions advantage to a paying student and not one that needs full FA, that is certainly within their right. I don’t sit up at night wondering about the fairness of people paying $1000 for a domestic flight getting priority access and a better seat than someone else paying $150. It helps to have a huge institutional endowment. That is why there are so few schools (like Yale) that can afford to have truly need-blind admissions</p>
<p>I did not personally apply ED to any schools, but I know friends who’ve applied ED and got in. </p>
<p>They’re pretty happy with their decisions (UPenn)(Cornell). </p>
<p>It’s always a choice</p>
<p>^^ Are you assuming that Athletes,legacies etc didn’t have the stats to get in on the merits?? Come on. At least you seem to recognise ED gets some boost. That’s the point we’re making. Nothing more.</p>
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<p>There seems to a built-in hurdle to surpass a 50 percent rate. Although I have no proof --except for historical data-- it does not appear that schools are eager to go beyond that number and create more wrinkles than needed. I happen to think that schools have few incentives to go well beyond such barrier as they know that there is plenty of fish in the sea, and that it makes little sense to confine the search to a … barrel. </p>
<p>Further, I also think that most schools could not fill the class entirely with early applicants and still please all the demanders of participanst with certain qualities. </p>
<p>In my book, most --if not all-- schools can meet their objectives with a 50 percent maximum ED participation, an active selection among the deferred, and if needed a deep mining into the wait list pool. There are more crutches than ED to get there!</p>
<p>Thanks, all, for your comments.</p>
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I’m tired of people saying this. What a false equivalence. Colleges are non-profit organizations (well, most of them are, and certainly all the ones we’re talking about are), and while they may have similar components to for-profit corporations, their goal is not to make money, or to better their own reputations. It’s supposed to be to educate students. That’s not to say I don’t think schools should market themselves, but the whole idea of ED seems shady to me. Colleges are now looking at not only an applicant’s academic capabilities, but also their willingness to attend, for the sake of yield / acceptance rate. That is definitely how a corporation would operate… but that’s not how I would like our top universities to operate. They are not corporations.</p>
<p>@invasion,</p>
<p>You beat me to it! ED is just another tool colleges use to game their rankings, along with aggressively touting for more students to apply so the students can be rejected. </p>
<p>In theory, the yield for ED is 100%. If a college fills more seats via ED, then they have leeway to reject a higher proportion of applicants during RD, thereby facilitating a lower admit rate and increasing the perception of exclusiveness & prestige.</p>
<p>Immoral? No. A rational strategy? Yes.</p>
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<p>If I were running a college, I would rather fill it with students who wanted to attend the college, rather than those who settled for it. Most (all?) selective universities practice holistic admissions, which means that they don’t limit their judgement to grades and test scores.</p>
<p>I agree with Xiggi,</p>
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<p>I see this pattern at our local public high school. Friends have told me the counseling office advises them to “have choices” in April. That’s fine, and there are rational reasons to apply to a range of schools, with an eye to finances. On the other hand, many of these kids would not qualify for FA; they’re full-pay wherever they attend, although they may not realize that.</p>
<p>My sense is that much of this thread is based on opinions and lacks facts.</p>
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<p>At several private academic high schools with which I’m familiar the opposite is true. The counseling office strongly encourages EA and ED applications, in particular to smaller (and selective) LACs. In practice a very high percentage (50+%) of students follow this advice. The number of spaces that remain available to RD applicants at these colleges is often 50 or less per-cent of the total spaces. Historically (based on Naviance, for example) the chances of acceptance for equally qualified RD students from these high schools to the same colleges is significantly lower than for the ED applicants.</p>
<p>Without question the RD applicants, at least from these high schools, are at a disadvantage because they couldn’t “commit” ED. My opinion is that this is unfortunate and (from my perspective) unfair.</p>
<p>For these same high schools the ED versus RD advantage for very selective universities (e.g. UPenn, etc.) is less clear. That said, the counseling office encourages ED applications selectively, and the chances for ED applicants is much higher than RD students. In part this is due to the support they receive by the often well connected counselors.</p>
<p>My response is bumping this thread back up. I have heard over and over again to not apply ED if your child needs financial aid. But what if the child might need the ED boost (and looking at our school’s Naviance, there does seem to be a boost and I believe that a school will give an edge to a student who has committed to attending and will help the yield) at the “meets full need” school? Sure, he might get in RD, but if he doesn’t, and we are mostly left with schools that don’t meet full need and require loans, aren’t we actually worse off? I am speaking of the financial category the Ziggi mentioned, the very low or zero EFC category. I DO realize that there may be merit aid at the “does not meet full need” schools which can be hard to figure early on with NPC’s… I guess my point is that waiting for RD doesn’t ALWAYS mean the student will end up with a better financial package than applying ED (again, we’re talking meets full need schools).</p>
<p>Yes, there’s a difference between “unfair” and “immoral”. ED may be unfair, but college admissions are inherently unfair anyway. And I agree with those who say that colleges who want to give an advantage to people who are willing to commit to them should have the right to do so. There are thousands of successful college applicants every year who go to great schools and didn’t apply early decision.</p>
<p>ED may not be the best informed decision for middle-class parents who need to compare financial aid packages, but that’s why parents need to be the adults here and put their foots down and say “no.” Being realistic with your student is far better than making them transfer out 2 years in because the school is no longer affordable (and never was from the beginning).</p>
<p>If people invested less emotionally into a particular range of colleges, I think this wouldn’t be such a problem. Imagine this: You’re shopping for homes and you find the PERFECT one, but you don’t yet have your mortgage approved and you have 10% to put down, so you trip off to the bank. Two days later, another family also thinks that house is perfect for them, but they have the mortgage approved already and they have 20% to put down right there. They’re ready to commit right away. Is it “immoral” for that seller to sell the house to the second family provided they never promised anything to you? Of course not. Or is it immoral for a seller to sell the house to a couple who walks in, looks around and says “we’ll take it” vs the family who says “give us 2 weeks to think about it”? Of course not! And this affects people for much longer term than it does college, considering the standard mortgage is 30 years.</p>
<p>But if students feel like they can be happy at a variety of colleges - and given that the vast majority of schools in the nation accept 40% or more of their students, and that even really great colleges can have acceptance rates approaching 40% or more - ED isn’t so much of a problem. They just apply RD to a variety of schools and hope for the best.</p>
<p>Also, non-profit organizations are also businesses. A business is simply an organization involved in providing goods and/or services to people. There are such things as not-for-profit businesses, and colleges are some. And anyone who thinks it is NOT a college’s goal (at least one of their goals) to make money is deluding themselves…universities try to make money ALL THE TIME. That’s why they pressure faculty into getting big grants, raise tuition every so often, have “cash cow” MA programs that don’t offer scholarships, etc. Now the money doesn’t go to shareholders - maybe it goes into building a new library or upgrading the science center to add new fMRI machines or funding two more philosophy PhD students.</p>
<p>But that doesn’t mean that the university isn’t looking to make money - and some universities are definitely looking to make money from their students. They don’t just want academic capabilities - they want students to attend so that their rankings stay high so they attract more students of the same caliber; they want students who are going to be really active on campus and in the community so they can put them in the magazines and brag to prospectives; and they want alumni who are going to come back for career panels and talk to students on the phone and return for homecoming and GIVE MONEY.</p>
<p>Consider also the successful ED applicant who needs to submit only one application, has finished the entire process in December, and then attends her by-far number one choice.</p>
<p>That was my older son, who is very happy at his new school, and for whom applying to only one school was the best thing he ever could’ve done. It was such a positive experience for him, that our whole family would love to have that stress free situation for my next son. That is IF he gets in… ! :)</p>