This year, I applied EA to Yale. It was my top choice, and, incidentally, one of the first schools I applied to out of the fourteen on my list. I got deferred.
I am a white, upper middle class female who goes to a mid-grade public school. I have the qualifications and the essay topics, but I don’t have the private school diploma, or the $4,000 college counselor, or the nationally-ranked public school. At the beginning of my application process, I had little to no knowledge of what colleges were looking for in terms of the physical application, despite scrolling through websites like these for hours. It is one thing to read a forum post; it is another to translate it to your Common Application. The people in my area and demographic, also applying EA to Ivies, were mostly private school kids or had access to amazing, expensive resources. As a result, I’m assuming my application fell flat in comparison to them, particularly with the strength of an EA pool.
My advice: apply to your dream school LAST (obviously, this is not true for ED schools or schools where there is a real, significant advantage to applying EA). Since applying to Yale, I have almost completely overhauled my applications. I wrote amazing supplements that I didn’t come up with before. I added sentences to my Common App essay. I completely changed the wording and order of my Common App activities section. Now, my application is extremely strong and could be seriously considered in the RA pool for Yale; alas, I applied early, and my crummy application is now against tens of thousands of others.
If you are like me (crummy public school, white), I’d really suggest waiting until the end, after everything else is done, to apply to the Ivies. Simply put, we are missing a lot of the stand-out things that get people admitted early. The knowledge that you will gain throughout the process of applying to your other schools will strengthen your application and make it a more serious contender in the RA pool, instead of a deferred, not-as-strong-as-it-could’ve-been application.
^^I agree with a lot of the sentiments in this post, practically word for word. My earlier applications were much weaker than the last application that I sent out.
As you go through more and more applications, you will keep catching little things to improve like adding specific details or remembering an experience that you didn’t include or elaborating on something you realized that may have been unclear. Not to mention, the person you are in November of senior year can change not insignificantly by the end of December. I overhauled my Common App essay completely on a whim. It’s much more personal now, and I am more proud of it compared to my original one. If a school doesn’t like it, then it probably isn’t a complete fit for me.
If I had to do the application process again, I would have avoided restrictive early action programs and applied to multiple early action programs, just to get a better sense of how my application stacks up. Not to mention, it would’ve been a huge relief to have an acceptance to a school that I would be happy under my belt already. Instead, I have to play the waiting game for another 2-2.5 months to hear back from most places.
So basically what I would like to say, in sum, to any younger people out there:
Start your Common App early. Basically, every time I read over it, I edited/revised something, sometimes major edits sometimes minor even up until the last application that I sent out.
Apply to some schools that are not at the top of your list. The proofreading before submission exposes a lot of potential edits and places for improvements.
If you're interviewing, maybe try to schedule some interviews that are less important to you before you interview for your top choices (if possible, many interviews you cannot request, some interviews you can).
Keep in mind that admissions while objective in some respects, is also very very subjective. It is extremely competitive for anyone who is not outstanding at this level. Don't think that while you're amazing at your school, you'll stand out in the pool of applicants for a place like Yale.
Submit your applications to top choices only when you feel like nothing could be better (though inevitably you will think at some point "ohhh, I should've worded it like this" or "could've included this"). Don't rush to meet deadlines. Try to work on your own schedule and I find that to produce my best work.
@lesjubilants@Zion101 thank you for ur insights, will be very helpful for my S20! While I hope u both get some fat envelopes from ur top choices soon! Good luck!
@makemesmart I think I should also say that if some REA/SCEA program is your absolute first choice, and you know that your application is ready to be submitted, then go for it. Don’t be fooled by the higher acceptance rates though. Unless the college definitively states that it is a boost, I would bet that it really isn’t as the application pool is probably stronger with legacies and athletes. But in my case and OP’s case, I think we would have both been better off waiting for the RD round. So this is just anecdotal advice, but maybe something to consider nonetheless.
@lesjubilants - I am sorry you are bitter about your deferral from Yale, but you should be proud that you made that cut. As you wisely advise others in your post, an application shouldn’t be submitted until everything is as good as you are capable of making it. That is what everyone on CC tells EA applicants. It is also the advice given to EA applicants by admissions officers across the country on their own college web pages and in their information sessions. It is great that you have both the skills and self-confidence to edit and improve your applications.
As far as being “white” and from a “crummy public school” goes, here’s one anecdote (which of course by itself doesn’t disprove your assertion that all the kids who got into Yale SCEA went to “private school” and had “expensive college counselors.” That evidence is provided by the Yale admissions page, where there are stats that challenge your claim that students have to be from privileged backgrounds or private schools to gain admission): In my own, very poor school district, where 65% of students receive reduced fee or free lunch, a white male student, who so excelled at Astronomy that he won not only an Intel but other international science competitions, was admitted to Yale with a full scholarship last year. There are other white students, my own kids included, (as well as students of color) with similar achievements from my district who were admitted to similarly competitive schools in the SCEA round this year. Everyone says that the competition in the SCEA round is the most intense, with the most qualified, and most “hooked” applicants, vying for acceptance. I hope you get the answer you hoped for in the RD round!
@worriestoomuch I’m not bitter, don’t worry. It’s not even my first choice anymore, funnily enough.
I’m telling applicants that they won’t know that their application is as good as they are capable of making it when they apply so early. When I applied to Yale, I was extremely confident about my application; as I tweaked things throughout the months, before my admissions decision came out, I realized how truly weak my application was.
Again, there is a difference between a qualified white kid from a crummy public school and a qualified white kid from a crummy public school who won international science competitions and an Intel award. That latter is not to whom this advice is addressed. Also, for clarification, I did not claim that students HAVE to be from privileged backgrounds, but rather that these privileged backgrounds often result in resources that lead to strong applications in terms of essays, wording, activity order, etc.
Thank you for the wishes of luck; I appreciate it! It’ll all work out in the end, I’m sure of it.
So, experience in writing your early essays led to improvement in your later essays. Can you tell us about your writing experience timeline? EA applications are due only two months before RD - couldn’t a student simply begin the writing process earlier, working from the bottom of the list upward, to see the same improvement and still apply EA to the schools on top of the student’s list?
There is a lot of sensible advice here, but most Ivies do not say that EA is helpful and Harvard categorically states that it isn’t. I believe Penn is the Ivy that accepts the highest percentage of EA applicants. I think all the most selective schools saw their ED or EA apps increase quite dramatically this cycle, so applying early will be less of an advantage than ever.
No one needs a $4k advisor or private school to get into an Ivy. Your most telling statement is that you had little to no idea what top schools are looking for in an application, and by extension, an applicant. That is the root of the problem. The huge, vast majority of students applying to those schools do not understand what those colleges look for, and it is probably relatively easy for colleges to initally reject applicants. That still leaves plenty of great applicants, of course, and they simply can’t admit them all.
A student who is serious about getting in is going to understand what the college is looking for and is going to convey that in their app. Dig deeper than rankings and show them how YOU fit in with their ethos. Read their mission statements. Get the best teacher recs you can. Don’t list ten actvivites that are allabout how you founded a club. Do interesting things that you enjoy doing and get really involved in them. Maybe that’s ten things, but maybe it’s two. It’s quality that matters.
in their haste to submit early, students simply don’t give themselves enough time to put together a good app. It’s commendable that you were deferred, so your app obviously wasn’t terrible. The fact that Yale is no longer your top choice is interesting. I suspect that once you were deferred, you allowed yourself to engage with the idea that there were other great schools out there that aren’t called Yale. I am 100% convinced that most studetns actually like the idea of being accepted to a prestigious school more than the thought of attending in the flesh.
Students do themselves no favors by latching on to the idea of a dream school. Every student should be applying to a range of colleges that they like and can afford. No one on this site should ever be stuck with only one choice that they don’t like. There is simply never any reason to not have at least one school that you will be okay with attending.
Yes, it’s best to get to work on the Common app early. Supplements should not be rushed. Activities should be listed in order of personal importantance.
@lesjubilants Very refreshing perspective! I would also love to hear more about your timeline. Did you start drafting essays in the summer, not quite knowing what the questions would be? In hindsight, what sort of plan would you suggest if you were a college counselor, for those students who can’t afford one?
While the needy student would have a great financial aid package from Yale, “scholarship,” as used in this sentence, might be misinterpreted to mean merit.
While I’m under the impression that low-SES is a major hook at HYPS, I think I see what @lesjubilants is trying to say, that the low-SES student may be late to the process of elite college apps and thus benefit from the extra time to craft a careful app RD rather than EA. I think extra time and achievements are apples and oranges, but certainly extra time would be beneficial if the student hasn’t been reading about this stuff for a long time and lacked access to quality college counseling.
@worriestoomuch I think some people may interpret the phrase “full scholarship” to mean a school is awarding you four years of tuition and room and board. I assume you probably didn’t mean that, as that’s not really what Yale is doing. They promise that each year you are below a certain level of family income and assets you won’t have to pay anything to them or take out a loan. The end result is pretty much the same for those who don’t have a large increase in income or assets at some later point.
@lesjubilants I agree about not applying to Yale EA, but for a different reason.
Like you, my son’s first choice was Yale, but after considerable thought he applied to Harvard EA. Why? Because Naviance at his (elite public) HS showed double the success rate for early apps to Harvard as compared to Yale. (This was specific to his HS, it could well be different, or even reversed for kids applying from other HS)
If Harvard had been his first choice he would still have applied to Harvard early based on the Naviance data.
Accepted Harvard EA, then applied Yale RD and received a likely letter. Now attending Yale.
The other advantage of applying somewhere other than your favorite EA, is that (if accepted) you will have a competing Fin Aid offer to show to your preferred school. In my son’s case, Harvard’s fin aid offer was better, and Yale was very happy to reconsider and raise their offer in light of Harvard’s. The Yale rep told me that she feels sorry for kids who apply SCEA and then don’t continue their RD apps as they have no competing offers to bring to Fin Aid. It is much easier for the Fin Aid department to raise an offer when they have a competing offer from a “peer” school in front of them than it is without a competing offer.
Best of luck on your RD apps!
For others reading this thread, I think the main takeaway should be to start your essays and application planning very, very early. So early that the extra time until the RD apps are due is irrelevant. Your EA essays need to be every bit as good as your RD ones.
The problem is not applying early, it is applying in a rush. If one has well prepared for the application over the summer and everything else is ready, there is no reason not to apply early.
People from crummy public schools needing FA get into Ivy League colleges SCEA/ED every year. However, they probably worked on the application for months ensuring that their essays were as perfect as they can be.
"Again, there is a difference between a qualified white kid from a crummy public school and a qualified white kid from a crummy public school who won international science competitions and an Intel award. "
Exactly. There are also 2 types of “crummy public schools,” the ones that have tons of resources and mentoring programs available, normally in large cities, and those that have zero support available like in the thousands of rural areas across the country.
I will also go out on a limb and say that no one becomes and international science competition winner without significant outside financial support and project assistance, no matter how bright they are.
@evergreen5
In terms of timeline, I had my Common App completely done by mid-September, including the essay. I worked through my applications one by one; I wrote all the supplements for one college and then submitted it after editing, then worked on the next one. Doing this, all of my EA applications (6 in total, as I applied to 5 public schools) were done by mid-October. I then had 9 more schools to apply to RD.
Good advice would be to start writing essays earlier and wait to submit the applications, but many will not be able to do this. I, for one, was gone the whole summer at an intensive academic summer program and couldn’t start writing earlier, and I feel like many students probably have similar experiences, especially if they’re high-achieving and applying to Ivies. Also, for me, the lapse of time throughout the fall was imperative in creating quality essays. Two of my best supplements were written in mid-December, after a bout of inspiration following a ton of personal reflection that a summer night wouldn’t have fostered. Again, that’s probably a personal thing, but students will change their writing style, their hopes, their ambitions, their interests, and even their personalities in the first four months of senior year- I know I did.