<p>Q: If I think I have lower chances at Princeton than I do at Cornell, should I apply SCEA to Cornell (thinking that I'll have a better chance at securing an Ivy League) or should I apply SCEA to Princeton hoping to improve my chances over and above those of the "average Princeton applicant"?</p>
<p>THIS SEEMS TO BE PARADOXICAL.</p>
<p>I've read that SCEA and RD candidates, when all is said and done, actually do have equivalent SAT scores, meaning that the purpose of SCEA is to increase the attendance rate of the college. </p>
<p>Is your only goal to “get an Ivy” or do you really want to go to Princeton?
These discussions (there are many of them these days! ) about whether to apply early to this ivy or that ivy are like debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin!
The odds are statistically so low of anyone except a seriously hooked applicant getting in that you might as well just flip a coin to decide.
My advice, just apply early to the one you like the best. The move on…</p>
<p>If you’re only wanting to apply ED for admissions purposes, then don’t apply ED. That’s not the point of the program and you really won’t be able to compare financial aid options for different schools without dropping your acceptance to Cornell anyway.</p>
<p>You don’t know what paradoxical means and that concerns me.</p>
<p>It is also not true that the profile of SCEA and ED actually do have equivalent SAT scores to RD admits. The difference is pretty significant. With any given stats, besides the best stats and the worst, your chances are better SCEA and ED.</p>
<p>A program which one uses to maximize one’s chances at a top university, which can be used only to one’s possible detriment in the admissions process belonging to all of the top universities to which one applies, is itself contradictory. Thus, paradoxical.</p>
<p>This program is also seemingly absurd, as it seems to betray the cause for which it is promoted (greater odds of admission).</p>
<p>None of this is mythical, that one was just for fun.</p>
<p>This is the big lie in college admissions that students who apply ED do not have a significant advantage over their RD counterparts. Colleges do not want to discourage RD applicants, and so why tout the ED advantage? Some universities like Duke are up front about the advantage ED confers, but most are not. </p>
<p>This advantage is especially significant in the Ivy league where most of the ED universities (Columbia, Cornell, Penn, Dartmouth, Brown) accept 40-50% of their class that way without ANY SCEA applicants from Princeton Harvard, Yale, or Stanford (many of whom will apply RD at Ivies upon deferment/rejection in the SCEA process, thus dramatically increasing the competitiveness of the RD pool at these schools).</p>
<p>If you look through the past posts on “Princeton SCEA Decisions 20XX” you’ll see that scores aren’t much of a factor in the early action pool. It’s more about Princeton grabbing as many hooked candidates as they can. </p>
<p>Also, the average SAT scores of ACCEPTED students at Princeton early action are not significantly lower than regular decision SAT scores of ACCEPTED students. I actually think it’s higher for early, but I’m not sure.</p>
<p>So are we using the traditional idea of a “hooked” applicant (URM, legacy, athlete, billionaire)? Or is it just anyone who stands out (CEO’s, authors, etc.) as well as the traditional hooked applicants?</p>
<p>The large large fallacy that students seem to believe (yet constantly denied by the colleges) is that SCEA imparts a better chance than RD – purely based on the numbers.</p>
<p>The schools that offer SCEA or REA consistently say the same message: we’d love to evaluate you early (thereby spreading out our workload and allowing us to really target the uber applicants among you) while a few lucky ones among you get to have a decision letter in hand by mid December.</p>