Sure, I get that. But that is a problem for the ED school. If they establish a program that is not very enforceable, then that is on them.
Instead of swapping admission reports with other ED schools, they could easily adjust their RD admissions to account for the ED cheaters. At worst, ED school will have to pull a few more from the WL. Formerly wait-listed-now-accepted-student will be ecstatic. The only negative to ED school is their reported yield. Too bad. That in itself is no reason to share admissions reports, IMO.
ED has lots of different plus/minus effects. And, as with all AT issues, it depends a LOT on how you define the market.
A lot of the admission plan stuff seems to be a way that schools of a certain level compete against the schools above and below them. And less about competing with their most direct peers.
By leaning heavily on ED, for example, Penn and Duke are able to compete much better for high end students against SCEA HYPS. That’s a big reason why those schools use ED so much – to poach from the schools above them.
By dangling the improved ED odds, Penn and Duke are also better able to compete against the big merit aid schools (USC, Tulane, Miami, Case) trying to poach them from below.
Among the big ED schools, the competition is probably the same with or without ED. Duke and Penn (versus each other) would do the same against each other either way.
It is no accident that schools of a certain peer group tend to have the same models in terms of admissions plans and aid. HYPS has their SCEA model. Penn, Duke and the other big ED users have theirs. ND, Gtown and BC (no surprise) all use REA rather than ED. Which is a great example of “conscious parallelism” that is typically legal without collusion.
ED doesn’t really reduce competition because an ED candidate is only interested in one college. They technically aren’t competing with other students in ED unless they are deferred. Competition for them only occurs when and if they are deferred and are now competing for seats at other colleges.
“ED doesn’t really reduce competition because an ED candidate is only interested in one college.”
Kids are interested in many schools – it is just that limiting kids to one silver ED bullet makes them restrict their shopping. If schools adopted double choice ED, kids would apply (and be interested in) two schools rather than one.
Penn, Hopkins, Columbia, Duke obviously compete against each other (intensely) in trying to get appealing applicants to pick them as the recipient of their one ED application. But among themselves, those schools would likely do equally well against each other whether they had ED or has unrestricted EA.
Here’s an easy way to see why ED itself reduces competition. Take ED to the extreme (i.e. colleges would fill 100% of their class with ED1 or 2). In that case, every applicant would have to decide on his/her college choice even before the application is submitted. Each college would only look at its own applicants who are not applying to any other college. And there’s no competition at all for applicants in this extreme case. In cases where the ED percentage is less than 100%, competition is still reduced and the amount of reduction will depend on the ED percentage.
“And there’s no competition at all for applicants in this extreme case.”
There would intense competition in an all ED world. 100% of the competition would be for applicants/applications.
Duke would still have to work very hard to get kids to apply ED to Duke rather than Penn or someplace else. But Duke and Penn would no longer have to compete over cross-admits (because there wouldn’t be any).
And one of the best ways to compete for those prized ED applications is to give kids a really favorable deal on their admit chances versus RD and/or the ED rate at competing schools. “Don’t waste your one chance applying to Stanford SCEA or Chicago ED. Apply to Duke ED and you’ll probably get in!!”
Since ED now accounts for more than half the class at these type schools, the competition for the ED application is actually very very important to Duke and Penn. Since the whole ED game doesn’t work for them unless large numbers of HQ applicants choose to apply ED.
I think Oxford and Cambridge are essentially 100% ED. If you apply to Oxford you can’t apply to Cambridge. So the competition occurs at the application stage rather than the cross-admitted student stage.
Not all that different than SCEA/ED as a practical matter.
I have a hard time seeing ED as straight up limiting competition. It changes the timing of the competition and creates opportunity costs, but so do EA and rolling admissions.
If it’s actually a privacy rather than a contractual issue, then it’s worth noting that FERPA covers all college students regardless of whether they have reached the age of majority or not.
I wouldn’t call Oxford/Cambridge scenario a competition. Both are public institutions owned by the government. There’s a single standard for admission. Perhaps it would be called duopoly if there weren’t other colleges. If college A says these are its applicants and college B says those are its applicants, and the pools don’t overlap. How could we call that competition? They aren’t competing for the same pool of applicants. Dividing up the applicants between them is not competition.
@northwesty, while I agree that it’s pretty clear the antitrust angle is the primary one, they’re also quite empowered to include any other relevant issues.
“while I agree that it’s pretty clear the antitrust angle is the primary one, they’re also quite empowered to include any other relevant issues.”
Nah.
The antitrust division within the US DOJ just sticks to antitrust. The AT division shares jurisdiction for antitrust with the FTC. FERPA rules and regs are within the US DOE. These guys have to stay within their own lanes.
If the antitrust guys uncover a FERPA problem, they would turf it to USDOE. Just like they would turf a tax issue to IRS, or an immigration problem to ICE, or an environmental problem to EPA. Government lawyers care a lot about who does/does not have jurisdiction.
My point was that I, the applicant, have a contract with JHS-Uni that is binding when JHS accepts me. If I also applied to dfbdfb College ED or RD then I am in breach of my contract with JHS-Uni. The fact that JHS-Uni cannot enforce our contract should I decide to cheat – outside of suing for enforcement – is their problem. But, our contract should not enable them to call up Northwesty-U and NJParent Tech and say, ‘hey, we just accepted BlueKid, hope he’s not on your list too.’
@bluebayou I believe that you are correct and there is a problem with schools sharing private information. The question is whether an ED applicant has a right to privacy in his application to a private university or is his application public information. The schools sharing information are helping each other. One is protecting its contractual rights and the other is managing yield and getting better information in building its own freshmen class. I suppose what bothers me most is that Amherst admitted that among the information shared in its lists include names of students who applied ED and who backed out. Blackballing and other retaliatory retribution as some form of rough justice seems to be an overreach. This NY Times article nails this issue https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/us/politics/justice-department-probe-college-early-decision.html
The wild card here is the Trump administration’s attack on our colleges. The endowment tax, while may see as “fair” does very little in raising revenue for the country. It’s minuscule and seems targeted and leads to some cynicism on this one as an attack on any college maintaining an ED system. That seems a bit far fetched. Why would they be asking about sharing information if they just want to kill ED? That doesn’t make sense. The Trump administration also indicated back in August a willingness to challenge affirmative action as “intentional race-based discrimination" against white students. It is not easy to see where the Trump administration and DOJ is going with anything related to colleges, but I don’t believe this is an attack on ED, but an attack on how colleges are implementing an otherwise worthy program.
@frozencustard : re: post #215 above. Thank you for posting the link to the New York Times article. I found the final 3 paragraphs of the article to be very enlightening–especially the Justice Dept.'s concern over the housing deadlines & recruitment of students already enrolled elsewhere. Doesn’t provide answers, but raises several issues worthy of thought. Thanks again for sharing the NYT’s article !
“Kids are interested in many schools – it is just that limiting kids to one silver ED bullet makes them restrict their shopping. If schools adopted double choice ED, kids would apply (and be interested in) two schools rather than one.”
Exactly, the days of ED being for the truly first choice are over. Many people apply ED to colleges they never have visited, kind of hard to say it’s their first choice. In the bay area ORMs apply to the five ivies that offer ED because their chances are higher, and they know they have very little chance at Stanford SCEA or RD, their true first choice.
@blubayou I know that politics is not supposed to be a focus on CC, but it is impossible to discuss actions taken by the DOJ without considering the reality that there are an unknown huge number of possible cases that the DOJ could pursue, yet it chose THIS one. Why? Different administrations have different agendas and this administration has displayed its anti-higher education and anti-“elites” agenda very clearly and intentionally. One cannot ignore that ideological agenda when considering this particular case.