Need to find two reach schools. Chance me!

Chance Me / Match Me!
21

@MOMANDBOYSTWO

“Best not to post statements like that without verifying.”
Thanks for saying that.

“But ED should be for a school you really like, so visit all schools you are considering before you make that ED commitment.”
Good point. I’m visiting Brown and Penn this summer. I’ve never considered Chicago. Would I have a better shot at Northwestern or Tufts?

“Penn, Brown & others are going to ask you to write about what you want to study and why at their particular school.”
I’m sure I want to study Computer Science. And I have been thinking about what to write about in those “why (major)?” essays. I have plenty of reasons why I like CS.

I agree that Harvard and Yale applications would be a waste. I’m glad you agree with me.

Thank you for your thoughts!

22

I really think you should visit all the colleges first before worrying excessively about which is easiest to get into. They are all competitve. If you are leaning toward Comp Sci, then you are probably good at math & can compute the odds of getting into each school with your stats.

That said, from what I recall from our visits & research, I think Tufts ED1 would be the easiest to get into of the group, but that doesn’t mean easy. And I’m no admissions expert, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. You could do Penn, Brown, or Columbia (or Northwestern or Chicago or another favorite) ED1. Then, if rejected, do Tufts ED2. Chicago now offers ED2 as well.

Google various rankings of Comp Sci programs and find out what you can about the Comp Sci programs while on the campuses.

Personally, I found Penn too hectic, compared to Tufts & Brown. My son, who is into Comp Sci, liked Penn the best of those three. Each person is so different.

23

@MOMANDBOYSTWO

“If you are leaning toward Comp Sci, then you are probably good at math & can compute the odds of getting into each school with your stats.”
That is some next-level shade

Could you expand on what you mean by ‘too hectic’?

24

I am probably too old, but I thought there was a lot of loud traffic around the Penn campus & lots of people/strangers touring the campus. Just felt crowded. But you may find the environment exciting, as I think my son did.

I’m also too old to know what “next-level shade” means, but it sounds cute, and I’m guessing you thought I was being snide. I was actually thinking that you sound pretty smart & can calculate the odds of acceptance at each school. If you are from the northeast, you can asume the competition for all those schools is especially tough. ED is totally the way to go. That is also the opinion of my son’s school college counselor & the other parents I know whose kids have gotten into top private colleges.

Good luck this year!

25

@MOMANDBOYSTWO I misquoted slightly, but got the gist of it correct. Penn became ** restrictive ** ED this year. Restrictive ED is even worse for applicants than SCEA. You cannot apply to any other private school EA if you apply to Penn ED, and if admitted, you are committed. So this was not a rumor, I knew I had read that right here on CC.

26

@suzyQ7 Wow. I just reread Penn’s website. That is a change. My son applied ED to Penn last fall, so I was fairly familiar with their admissions process just a few months ago!

Are there any other schools that have this “Restrictive ED?” We never ran across any. So, does this mean that @coterie would not be able to apply to Northeastern EA if he did ED to Penn? (Or is Northeastern’s EA deadline also a scholarship deadline, as that seems to be an exception?) But he could still apply to any public colleges EA, and he could apply to private schools like USC that have unrestricted early scholarship deadlines?

I wonder why Penn felt the need to prevent kids from applying to EA private schools. I guess they want to appear “elite” like the SCEA schools? What a silly game. ED seemed restrictive enough to me!

@coterie Read these application details on each college website carefully & ask questions on campus to clarify if needed.

27

I’ll be sure to ask UPenn about this during the info session. Thanks, @MOMANDBOYSTWO

28

It is clear from their rules and from what others have said on this site that if you apply ED to Penn, you cannot apply EA to any other private school. I think they are doing this to improve yield for the early program… SCEA is being used as a backup for many kids who end up getting accepted to better schools or schools with offer merit. By limiting ED to only 1 school (not allowing any other private EA apps) the student who gets accepted ED to UPENN has no other offers in hand in December and a requirement to enroll vs their previous SCEA policy where they could sit on that acceptance until hearing back from all other schools in March. I believe this policy will greatly improve their yield. Not better for students, of course.

@MOMANDBOYSTWO More discussion here:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-pennsylvania/1906041-penn-early-decision-now-restrictive-early-decision-p2.html

29

@suzyQ7 The only schools that I know of that have SCEA are Georgetown, Boston College, Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, and Yale. Penn used to have ED, like many other privates. Am not sure that it ever had SCEA. I think Penn might be the first college ever to create this Restrictive ED, unless colleges had it in the past, when my kids were younger and I wasn’t paying attention.

Has anyone heard of another college that has ever had this Restrictive ED? It is different from and more restrictve than other early application options of ED, SCEA, and EA.

Penn’s yield from regular ED was always very high to begin with. I’ve now read the other threads in CC about this and no one seems to totally understand Penn’s need for this change. The motivation just seems to be greed for a miniscule number of students or the desire to pay out less fin aid (again greed). Penn maybe wants the kids who might back out of ED acceptance for an EA or SCEA school. But why would they want that type of kid who would so easily break a contract anyway, even if they back out for financial reasons? And, with Penn’s high ED yield last year, not that many kids can be breaking the ED contract for other schools anyway.

Is there a strategic reason that a highly qualified kid might now pick Penn over other top schools that have SCEA (listed above) or EA (MIT, Cal Tech) now that Penn has changed from ED to this more restricted ED? If they wanted Stanford SCEA or MIT EA before, won’t the same kids still want Stanford or MIT now and just not apply to Penn early? Those kids might later apply to Penn RD if Stanford or MIT defers or rejects them in Dec.

You actually have to be a lawyer or have a college degree these days to interpret all the games and rules these colleges are creating in admissions. Maybe a comp sci major could plot out all of the possible permutations of how this new Restricted ED might affect student decisions and the impacts on Penn in the future.

@coterie Sorry to be plaguing your thread with this topic, but since you are potentially interested in Penn (and it was my son’s first choice this year), it seems a little relevant. Clearly no one should assume that how a college did things last year will be the same this year.

FYI - My son applied ED to Penn SEAS. Got deferred then denied at the end. But he had other choices that he liked a lot, so all was OK. You’ll do great too because you are a thinker and a planner.

30

@MOMANDBOYSTWO There is no need to apologize at all. Doing research and analysis on a school I’m interested in isn’t a plague on the thread – it’s a favor.

To add on what you’re saying: if this is all true (and I’ll confirm it at the info session), then it makes me very hesitant to consider Penn, since it would limit my opportunities to apply early elsewhere.

31

Penn is really screwing kids like yours @MOMANDBOYSTWO who apply ED for the chance bump, but apply to other EA schools that may be more realistic. I wonder I they will accept more ED students now than before to show that the restriction will improve chances. Sounds like Penn doesn’t want kids to use their ‘lottery ticket’ type app on them - they only want the kids that really feel like they have a great chance to get in and REALLY want to go to Penn.

32

@coterie On the other hand, most of those top schools all have some form of ED or SCEA. And you can only pick one ED or one SCEA. So, if you end up loving Penn best, then just apply to Penn ED and to all of your public university choices EA in the fall. Penn does not restrict you from applying to any publics early. So you could still apply early to places like Michigan, UCLA, UVA, Rutgers, etc if you wanted.

You can also apply early to any private colleges that have scholarship deadlines in the fall. Penn allows those in addition to any publics. USC is an example of a top private college that has an early scholarship deadline: Dec 1. I know you’re not thinking of the west coast, but there may be other private colleges with similar early scholarship deadlines. Not sure.

If Penn ED doesn’t work out in Dec, then you submit some RD applications to Brown, Northeastern, etc. and maybe an ED2 application to Tufts or somewhere else, if you choose to. Of course, you try to have those applications ready to go before the Penn decision comes out. Or, you can actually submit as many RD applications as you want in the fall, and your parents just lose that application money if you get accepted to ED Penn.

Hope for the best and plan for the worst…

33

@suzyQ7 Funny because my son did not necessarily apply to Penn as a lottery ticket, even though all acceptances to those schools are like a lottery. He was quite qualified to go to Penn & did choose it as his first choice, after much discussion with and support from his college counselor. 34 ACT, 1490 SAT, perfect math scores on both, 11APs, two college courses, typically high GPA and subject test scores, lots of academic and activities awards in school and out, etc etc. But, from his small private school, three other white boys like mine but all with lower stats, also applied ED to Penn last fall. My son got deferred by engineering and one kid got rejected by Wharton. The other two boys were accepted ED by the College of Arts & Sciences: one was a legacy and the other was a recruited athlete. We know these kids and their records. In their defense, the kids accepted to Penn from our school would be better in interviews than my son and they are both really nice kids, with leadership skills, so we did not begrudge them. It was just a little hard to know that both had lower test scores and the athlete was not even in the top 20% of the class for grades. Holistic decisions were at work. Fortunately my son understood that and was totally prepared for a negative decision.

Ironically, my son ended up RD at Cornell, which is actually a more highly ranked engineering school than Penn. And, he had almost applied ED to Cornell in the first place. Things work out for smart kids who work hard.

I think it’s ironic, too, that I was accepted to Penn years ago and turned it down for Cornell.

34

Correction to my Post #29 about SCEA colleges. Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford are the only Single Choice Early Action (SCEA) schools that I found right now. From what I can tell, Notre Dame, Georgetown, and Boston College are Restricted Early Action (REA). At those three private colleges, you can apply EA to any other private or public schools, but you can’t apply ED1 to any schools. (You can apply ED2 though…) There may be others like that, but I don’t know about them. From what I could find, Penn is the only Restricted ED school right now.

35

If you like northwestern, and it’s a good school for you, you should 100% ed there. Don’t waste your ED, going through RD will suck. ED should be used very strategically, and i’ll be frank, i think it’s idiotic to waste it on a school that isn’t absolutely your first choice or one you like that you have a decent chance of getting into. much better to get into northwestern ED than end up nowhere after being rejected by some other school ED and everything else RD.

36

@vkrish

I can apply to Brown ED and Northeastern EA at the same time. If I get denied to Brown, I’ll still likely be admitted to NE. If I get in Brown, then I’m going to one of my favorite schools, and it’s an Ivy. Win/win.

(Of course, I’m applying to a backup school. Which coincidentally also has EA.)

37

Aren’t Brown and Northeastern opposites of each other?

38

@coterie

I didn’t see anyone correct this earlier statement in post #11:

No school can force you to accept an offer of admission if their financial aid package makes college unaffordable. It doesn’t happen often, but if it should, there is no example of a school suing to force a student to attend, nor is there some kind of list you hear people talk about sometimes. Certainly if you apply ED and everything works out, you are ethically obligated to attend that school, but of course why wouldn’t you if you chose it for ED in the first place? Just wanted to get that out there so no one accuses me of promoting people to renege on their ED deals. I am not sure if you ever said whether finances are an issue or not.

As far as the detail of choosing between some of these schools based on odds of acceptance, a lot of it is hair-splitting. Columbia, Brown, Penn, etc. They are all hard to get into, ED or otherwise. More importantly they are similarly hard to get into. I think you had the right idea to start, if the need to apply ED at all is something you cannot avoid. Visit the schools and/or read about them as much as possible and choose which one to apply to ED based on your best assessment of what appeals to you most. Whatever that may be, because saying any one of these is going to give you a better engineering education than another is nonsense. They all teach the same things and have the most qualified faculty and students in the world. And yes, the quality of your fellow students should be as important if not more so than the difference in faculties, at the undergrad level. Undergrad is more about classroom teaching, not research. The difference in faculty quality is not discernible in most cases. But that’s a whole 'nother discussion.

39

@fallenchemist Thanks for your thoughts.

40

@coterie “I can apply to Brown ED and Northeastern EA at the same time.”

Given your (and your parents’) preferences, this is your best strategy. You have a great chance of getting merit money.