Pls help i am thinking of applying ED to Harvard next year and I want to know lol
Harvard is SCEA, not ED. There is some debate back and forth on these pages, but IMO there is no admissions advantage. That is also Harvard’s official position. We see higher admissions rates for SCEA for Harvard, but you have to factor in recruited athletes, development cases and other major hooks plus legacies who tend to apply EA. On top of that, there is no doubt that the EA pool is much more competitive than the RD pool. That is something Harvard explicitly states. The only possible advantage I can see is if you have something unique but Harvard only needs a limited number of them, you might be better off applying before they hit their “quota”.
If Harvard is your top choice, and you can have your app squared away by the EA deadline, there are other advantages to applying EA. If you get in, you can drastically reduce the number of app’s you will submit (and have a pretty stress free rest of senior year). If you get outright rejected, given the huge number of EA applicants that are historically deferred, it probably means you need to reassess how strong your app is and you may want to adjust what schools you should consider reach, match and safety and/or there may be some issue with your essays/LoR’s. If you are deferred, nothing has changed.
@BKSquared thanks so much that makes a lot of sense
There are some disadvantages to applying SCEA, too. If you apply to Harvard SCEA, you can’t apply nonbinding Early Action to any other private university (such as MIT, Georgetown, Caltech), and you can’t apply on a binding Early Decision basis anywhere. That’s relevant, because Early Decision programs generally do confer a meaningfully higher chance of admission, assuming that you are a good candidate to begin with. If, say, you liked Harvard and Columbia almost the same, there would be a much higher chance of being accepted at one of them if you applied ED to Columbia, and applied on a regular basis to Harvard if Columbia didn’t accept you ED (There are some serious negatives about ED programs, too.)
Before you make a decision what type of application to submit where, take the time to understand the different early admission programs, and how they could affect your family’s costs. There’s lots and lots of chat on College Confidential about that subject.
This part is key. If you need to compare FA offers and/or your finances are too complicated for an accurate calculation from the NPC, ED is probably not the way to go, even if, for some schools, it gives a slight admissions boost.
I always find it hard to believe that the difference in acceptance rate 14.5% in REA vs 2.5% in RD is entirely due to difference in applicants quality. Of course, from time to time we see some deferred REA applicants being admitted during RD, which suggests RD being easier, but the reverse—accepted REA applying again RD–can never be tested. So, I guess we will never know for sure if the school’s claim about no difference in REA vs RD outcome is true.
A percentage of applicants (albeit small) deferred
EA are admitted RD
If you end up applying SCEA, make sure you apply non-binding early to some public university that you would be happy to attend. It’s really hard to get bad news in December and have to wait 3 to 4 months to hear about anything else.
answer: yes
@bigwhopper: The answer is “no” because Harvard does not have an ED option.