I cant decide which one to apply for. I feel like an extra 2 months would let me do the common app and princeton supplements better but at the same time Princeton is a better fit for me. Any recommendations?
Apply MIT EA and do RD at Princeton. Your second application will always be better than your first (and third will be better than your second…) so spend those two months on Princeton if you feel that it’ll be a better fit.
There is little, if any, admissions advantage in applying SCEA Princeton. Putting your best application forward is much more important. If your app’s aren’t yet in great shape, why would you apply to MIT early? I know MIT is its own application, but if I remember correctly, it is every much as involved as any other app with multiple short essays. Same reasoning applies.
The SCEA admit rate at Princeton is more than triple that of RD. Even accounting for legacies and recruited athletes, SCEA will provide more of a boost than EA at MIT.
My D had the same question her top 3 were MIT, Princeton and Chicago. It was SCEA Princeton or MIT/Chicago EA… She thought SCEA would give her the boost over EA so that is the way she went. In the end she got deferred but accepted during RD. She didn’t get into MIT RD. I can speculate in her case that Princeton may have questioned her class rigor since her school didn’t offer APs. She was taking classes at Penn/Drexel her Sr year so I could see why they may have wanted to wait to see her grades before extending an offer. I guess what I’m saying is if a school has any hesitation that don’t lose anything deferring you to the RD round so don’t worry about increased chances just pick your top school and apply to it early.
^^ So, anyone is free to believe that Princeton is lying, even though it has no incentive to discourage students from applying early. In fact, if there is any incentive, schools generally want more early applicants who tend to have higher yields. https://admission.princeton.edu/faqs#early-action:
"Is there an advantage to applying Single-Choice Early Action?
All applicants to Princeton, whether they apply early action or regular decision, receive the same comprehensive, holistic review. Those who apply early gain no strategic advantage; the only advantage is one of convenience. If you know that Princeton is your first choice, then it may make sense for you to apply early."
Let’s look at the numbers for the class of 2021: EA applicants 5,003; admitted 770; rate 15.4%; subtract for about 220 athletes and special cases (development, faculty, etc… but excluding legacy) = adjusted rate of 11.5%. RD rate 4.7%.
I did the same for HY, who also are both on record saying SCEA does not provide an admissions advantage. Their adjusted rates are 13.4% and 11.5% vs RD rates of 5.0% and 3.4%. So all three of these schools have very similar patterns of having about a 7-8% differential between EA and RD rates. In fact Princeton has the lowest gap of the three.
I choose to believe that these three schools are being truthful about the reasons why someone should EA, it’s your first choice and your app is ready, and any differences in admissions rates are based on differences in applicant pools. If OP’s app can be better in 2 months, that will serve him/her better than putting in his/her app now for SCEA.
@BKSquared It’s possible that students also self-select for the EA process—you would most likely apply to EA if you know your application is competitive. RD probably opens up to the larger “reach” applicant pool.
And, if I’ve learned anything about admissions, it’s that nothing they say is true :(|)
@aoeuidhtns, yes, precisely my point that the EA admissions rates are so much higher because the applicant pool in that round is going to be of more highly qualified applicants, plus recruited athletes and special cases like development applicants who tend to apply early. This is the explanation that HYP AO’s routinely provide, including on their websites
Yale: “Applying Single-Choice Early Action does not increase the likelihood of being admitted to Yale. Historically, the rate of admission among early applicants has been higher than the overall admission rate because many of our strongest candidates, from a wide range of backgrounds and interests, apply early.”
Harvard: “Harvard does not offer an advantage to students who apply early. Higher Early Action acceptance rates reflect the remarkable strength of Early Action pools. For any individual student, the final decision will be the same whether the student applies Early Action or Regular Decision.”
While the AO’s don’t always give you the most straightforward answer, and many statements (public and private) are vague or highly qualified, I personally have never known one that I have dealt with to outright lie, although obviously there are shades of truth.
That difference is certainly not negligible, but at any rate the numbers are only part of the story.
Admissions officers are judging each application both on its own merit and within the context of the freshman class which they are carefully crafting. The orchestra needs good musicians, and the debate team needs champion debaters. You’ll need a few dancers and actors, and the soccer team needs people too. All of these factors are considered while reading each application. If you’re the first oboist in the application pool with a 2340 SAT, 4.0 GPA, and state awards, you may very well luck out. If you’re the 50th or 60th…perhaps not so much. One of the greatest advantages of early admissions, aside from the blatant bias of many colleges for early applicants,* is the ability to submit your application while all of these slots in the freshman class are still open. By the time RD rolls around, upwards of 40% of the freshman class has already been filled, and you have about five times as many applicants fighting for the remaining spots.
It’s no secret that MIT is not as holistic in admissions as some of the other top universities (though more so than Caltech), whereas Princeton aims for as diverse a freshman class as possible.
*I’ve collected numerous statements from top universities over the years expressing preference for ED applicants. Even Princeton and Yale were open about preference for ED applicants when they had ED, with Princeton’s admissions website stating “We take into account that students who apply early have carefully considered the ‘match’ they feel with Princeton.” Alas, many colleges that used to be open about admissions have long since vanished these statements from their websites.
A month is more than enough time for an application. Realistically, most students on CC who’ve wrestled with this decision and avoided EA/ED ultimately end up procrastinating until they’re finishing RD apps in December over winter break. Perhaps you’re an exception and would utilize the two months properly, however.
Based on my conversations with Princeton admissions, and given Princeton’s hand-crafted, diverse assembling of a class, I really believe in applying SCEA. I also suspect that application fatigue in RD leads to less considered, more arbitrary results. Given the numbers, I just don’t see how it is possible that RD applicants are given that exact same “comprehensive holistic review”, especially with tired/grumpy/stressed-out adcoms. Each year the application numbers increase, but by an unknown amount, and as the days count down, there must be much more pressure on final RD decisions. I don’t think Princeton is lying, just ignoring some human factors. I’d love to data-mine SCEA vs. RD and test @warblersrule oboist hypothesis. 
@warblersrule, what makes you say that MIT’s process is not as holistic as others?
@warblersrule and @pyswar, I agree that there is the “human” factor to consider and also possibly the “first in line” factor, which I think holds true for legacy applicants even for schools who don’t overtly state so like Penn. However, I do think the gap in EA rates vs RD rates (aside from athletic recruits, etc.) is primarily driven by differences in the quality of the applicant pools, especially for highly selective schools. The numbers I ran do show a real gap between SCEA rates and RD rates for HYP, but it was interesting to me that the gaps were similar. Just for kicks I ran the numbers for Dartmouth and Brown where it is pretty much acknowledged that there is definitely an admissions plus to apply ED. Not surprisingly, the gaps were even larger for these 2 schools. The adjusted ED rates were 18.8% D, 16.1% B vs. RD rates of 8.5% and 6.9%, respectively, and that was assuming the same 220 recruits and special cases, which are probably less for these 2 schools. Reducing that number would make the gap even larger (@200 special cases, the adjusted ED rates would be 19.7% and 16.7%).
There are plenty of areas that AO’s don’t want to be fully transparent, so they either don’t say anything or provide vague statements that are qualified 10 different ways. I just don’t see the reason here. It is in the schools’ interest to assemble a “handcrafted, diverse” class, and a great tool for that is assembling as much of that class early where yields have always been higher, the ultimate yield tool being ED. If HYP were to state that SCEA offers a “plus”, it would follow that even more highly qualified applicants would apply early for them to pick and choose. They affirmatively deny this. I just don’t see why they would do this vs. even being vague or silent on the topic.
One of the problems with accepting too many kids in the ED round is that it might depress the numbers of applications in regular round if RD kids don’t think there is much of a chance. We will see if last years UChicago’s 2 percent RD yield hurts them in terms of total applications this year.
^ They can still keep their EA acceptances at about 40%, but you would think if in fact there were already an advantage and there were an affirmative statement that EA confers an advantage, the EA pool to consider would be larger and even higher quality.