This is what we are doing at this point. I want him to check and be proactive but its not happening. So for now for the email we specifically created for college application I check once a day and if anything important I ask him to check.
I am not 100% happy with this but this is one of the only few ways he lets me help as he is very independent and this keeps my stress levels low.
If you apply ED but request need based aid, have I just crushed my kidâs chances?
For families who are interested in having emails forwarded to multiple accounts, SimpleLogin is an option. It can be a way of masking emails (so, Harvard@myemail.com, Yale@myemail.com, UCLA@myemail.com) and then you can indicate where you want the emails forwarded, and you can select multiple accounts. So for health, school, etc. accounts for our kid, both my spouse and I are forwarded the emails. Then, it can also be used to see who sells your email info. If all of a sudden Princeton Review is sending you stuff to the CollegeName@myemail.com, you know which college (or company, etc,) did it, and you can also just turn that email alias off if unsubscribe doesnât work.
If you apply ED but need need-based aid, your kid still has a shot. If itâs at a need-blind school, it doesnât matter. If itâs at a need-aware school, it could impact it. It will also depend on how much need your family has and how badly the school wants your kid. If one family needs $20k in aid and another family needs $70k in aid, the family that needs less is likelier to get the acceptance. But if the school really wants the kid who needs $70k in aid, they can still say yes to the kid.
Yup. And also, beware of over-reading into the statement that âwe meet 100% of demonstrated need.â Thatâs also thrown around as a way to not have to say explicitly that theyâre need aware. But they too are need aware unless they explicitly say otherwise.
Schools that are need blind trumpet this. No school will be coy about it!
Thanks for clarifying. My son has been trying to decide between two different schools for ED, one of which is Wake. The other is need blind. Since he will be full pay, it seems like he has a better chance of admission at Wake, all else being equal, correct? Thanks.
Maybe! Because remember that need blind â need ignorant. There are usually scads of tells across an application. Rare is the college application which leaves an AO completely scratching their head as to the applicantâs SES.
ETA: also, IIRC the Chetty study showed how very over-represented the very wealthy are at Top X schools. Most of which are need blind 
So as I mentioned, one of the first things you would need to do in order to implement the strategy I outlined is NOT filter for âhighly selectiveâ where that is defined by a high volume of applications and a corresponding low admit rate.
To illustrate this, consider one of the more notorious yield-protectors, Northeastern, now ranked #53 by US News. Northeastern in their latest CDS had a 32.9% ED acceptance rate (890/2707). Otherwise they had a 6.0% acceptance rate (5301/88293).
Now letâs compare the University of Rochester, ranked #47 by US News. For ED, they had a 42.7% ED admission rate (614/1437), 38.6% otherwise (7136/18496). That is barely different, and probably not different at all when you take out hooked applicants.
So what the heck is happening here?
Well, Northeastern is in Boston, which is probably the most popular single destination for college students in the United States. Rochester is in Rochester, which is . . . not that.
So Northeastern got about 70,000 more non-ED applications than Rochester.
Which are surely almost all applicants that preferred other colleges in Boston, maybe many other colleges in Boston, but applied to Northeastern too as a backup. Whereas at Rochester . . . that did not happen.
OK, so if you really want to go to Northeastern, and have high numbers, yeah, you might want to apply ED to Northeastern. Because Northeastern may well reject you on the theory you are just going somewhere else anyway, if you apply RD.
But Rochester is extremely unlikely to do that, because it neither needs to, nor will it work. Instead, they will likely admit you (at least if you do a basic amount of demonstrated interest), and then might well fight for you with a merit offer.
OK, so my proposed solution to people who are concerned about Northeastern yield protecting, but they would prefer another college, so they donât want to ED at Northeastern, is . . . apply to Rochester! And embrace the idea that if your top choices in Boston donât work out, good news, if anything Rochester is actually a better college, even though Northeastern has a way lower admit rate. Because that admit rate doesnât mean anything, it is just Northeastern rejecting a bunch of kids who were never going there anyway.
But you also have to live with the fact Rochester is in fact in Rochester, and not Boston.
So right, if you are hooked in some way, you might well have an ED advantage even at Rochester. I am not sure what you are referring to, though. Like, if you had something that just generally made you a more interesting candidate than most people with your numbers, that would probably be just as good for RD at Rochester as ED. The sorts of hooks that might go away, or at least diminish, are things like being a recruited athlete, being a legacy, being on a deanâs list, and so on.
So we are talking about totally different things. S is considering ED at schools with 8-12% acceptance rates overall that double or triple for ED vs trying for RD in hopes of having merit and choice. He has a music spike.
My DS tells me that a few of his friends (recruited athletes) have already gotten offers and at least one has committed despite it only being mid-September. One of the kids was told by a top 20 LAC that his offer would stay on the table as long as he maintained at least a 65 in everything. I had obviously heard about this type of stuff happening but its sort of wild to actually witness it all unfold.
Well, we are not completely talking about different things, because that describes Northeastern, except for the fact with them it is actually quintupling.
However, it is true there are other colleges that are not yield protecting like Northeastern (likely) is. At those colleges, ED rates might be double or more, but without most individual unhooked applicants getting any sort of advantage. Because a combination of hooks and a higher qualification skew in the ED pool could be enough to explain that sort of difference.
So this may or may not function as a type of informal hook, depending on what you mean.
A classic example is if the orchestraâs tuba player is graduating, conceivably the college could want to make sure to enroll a new orchestra tuba player. Now, the normal way to do this is to get to the waitlist phase, and see which items like that have not been checked off among enrolled students. If orchestra tuba player is still not checked off, then they can try to find one on the waitlist.
However, there are potential issues with that. Maybe there is too great a chance there will be no such tuba player on the waitlist. Or maybe the college thinks it can get a better tuba player in ED than in RD or off the waitlist. So, if it sees a tuba player in ED that they think is better than their usual RD/waitlist admits, maybe they will grab them.
But when you think about it, this is a very narrow case. They have to have the need for an orchestra tuba player that class. They need to either not be sure they can get one off the waitlist, or think this one in ED is better than what they would likely get in the RD/waitlist rounds.
But if that last thing is true, then maybe this kid didnât need ED in the first place. And if it is not true, likely they will just be deferred. Unless the college is really worried about that no tuba players on the waitlist thing.
OK, so does this ever happen? Sure, probably.
But unless you are actually being soft-recruited in some way, AND at least really well qualified in general, I wouldnât put a lot of faith in it.
But maybe your kid is being soft recruited. If so, then yes, that is the sort of case where applying ED might well make a difference, just like it typically does with athletic recruits.
My son was also accepted RD, but it 1st generation. He was told by admissions early on that there was no advantage given to ED. I still had him send his application in by the ED date. Donât know if they even looked at it or put it in the RD pile. I do know that every AO reads your application and you have to get a majority yes vote.
Definitely management material - he already mastered âdelegating upâ.
ED acceptance rate can be quite misleaing for unhooked applicants, especially for small school.
My D22 had applied ED to Williams and was deferred/rejected, however, she was accepted to Amherst in RD.
The ED acceptance rate for Williams was over 25%, but if you take out the athletes, URM and all the other considerations, I donât know how much it was better than the RD.
I think it might be better to look at the percentage of the class that is made up of ED applicants along with the ED acceptance rate. Many SLACs are now close to 50% ED applicants.
Of course they are typically high percentages of recruited athletes too.
Like I gather we are talking Williams. Latest CDS says 1302 admitted, 577 enrolled total. ED admits were 254, presumably they basically all enrolled.
OK, so that is like 44% of enrolled students. But I believe Williams has said before about 30% of a typical class are recruited athletes. Assuming they are at least mostly ED admits, that leaves only like 14% of the remaining 70%, which is down to 20% of the non-recruited-athletes who actually enroll being ED admits.
And in terms of admits, that is something like 81/1129, or only 7% of non-recruited-athlete admits being ED admits. The difference, of course, is a lot of the RD admits do not yield.
So . . . the part of the Williams admit pool that is not recruited athletes appears to only have a pretty small percentage of ED admits. Of course there is some estimation and assumption here, but I think generally when people point out ED admits are mostly hooked, it has more important mathematical implications than some realize for non-hooked applicants.
I wasnât necessarily talking about Williams, their ED percentage isnât quite as high as some others. Hereâs a chart from last year that everyone might find interesting.
WashU is crazy. Over 3/4th of a class of over 2,000 students per class from ED. Thatâs definitely way more than athletes and hooked apps.
Barnard is also interesting â 25% admit rate or 3% admit rate.
I really wish they wouldnât put it that way. A higher acceptance rate across two different pools does not necessarily mean every, or indeed any, individuals had higher odds.
So again it pays to be precise with the math.
In the latest CDS, WUSTL had 1092 people admitted under an ED plan. Overall, 3764 were admitted, 1813 enrolled.
So ED admits, assuming they all enrolled, were 60.2% of enrolled students. (Edit: I thought Kickstart might have been using a different CDS, but I checked and their numbers just donât seem right to me. In the 2021-22 CDS, it was 1098 of 1980, which is 55.5%. 2020-21, 1080 of 1801, 60.0%.)
But they were only 29.0% of admitted students. The difference, again, is that non-ED admits donât all yield. Indeed, the math suggests that out of the 2672 non-ED admits, about 721 enrolled, which is a yield of 27.0%.
I donât know how much of the WUSTL class is hooked in some way. But I note in the Harvard litigation, at Harvard it was about 30% of admits. So 29% of WUSTLâs latest admit class being ED is not inconsistent with at least most of those being hooked people.
That said, it probably isnât all of them. But again the way this math is heading, probably only a pretty small percentage of WUSTLâs unhooked admits were ED admits. But they are a much higher percentage of the enrolled class, because obviously virtually every ED admit actually enrolls, whereas in this cycle, only about 27% of WUSTLâs non-ED admits actually enrolled.
1 more app submitted. 3 left to go. Some collegesâ portals are frustrating to use.