Parents of the HS Class of 2024

Parents Forum Class of 20xx Community
6124

I agree not enough people really think of it from the school’s perspective. ED is an opportunity for them to lock in people that are not easily replaced out of RD, and so that applies to “hooked” candidates and maybe a few other informal sorts of admits. But if you are the sort of candidate they will see a lot of in RD, and they wouldn’t clearly want you in RD anyway (in which case it doesn’t matter), then a deferral would seem to make more sense.

Indeed, even if their yield model says that, say, only 20% of RD admits like you will yield, if they are pretty indifferent to which 20%, then they can just admit 5 of you for every 1 slot to fill and get the class they want.

That said, possibly this dynamic is complicated when a school just gets a ton of high-quality applicants who have them deep on their preference list (aka “Tufts Syndrome”). Schools like that might plausibly prefer to reject such people rather than wait around for them decide, if say their yield model suggests they only have a really low chance of getting you. Like it is one thing if they have a 20% chance of you yielding. Very much another thing if they only have a 2% chance. They may not in fact want to admit 50 of you for every 1 slot to fill and hope that works out.

So in cases like that, if you have really good qualifications for that school but they are actually your top choice, you may want to make a point of applying binding. But conversely if they really are only like 10th on your personal list–maybe the best solution is to try to find alternatives which do not get so many applications from people like you with preferences like yours.

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6125

So, suppose you are the coach of a varsity team. You need a variety of new players for different roles on your team. You want to know that a specific player is coming so you don’t need to recruit someone else for that role. So you want them to commit to you, and have admissions sign off, as soon in the process as possible. So it becomes a de facto rule that if you want to get the benefit of being a recruited athlete, you have to apply ED.

The general point behind such cases is that the college is not confident it can replace that specific individual out of the RD pool. In this case, the coach is not confident they can find a player of the quality they want for that team role in RD. And that is in part a function of the fact they know that those players will have been recruited somewhere else, likely applied and been admitted ED somewhere else, and therefore won’t be in the RD pool at all.

Once you start thinking in these terms, it becomes plausible a lot of “hooks” might work like that. Take legacy. Cornell actually says you need to apply ED to get a legacy advantage. This is also talked about informally in relevant circles.

OK, so for whatever reason a college likes enrolling legacies. But they are not confident they can replace legacies they do not admit ED out of the RD pool. Which makes sense, both because most of the well-qualified legacies will apply ED to begin with, and also because well-qualified legacies who do not apply ED are basically telling that college they very likely would go somewhere else. Indeed, very likely many of the well-qualified ones will actually be admitted somewhere else ED. So the pool of legacies who are actually going to plausibly yield if admitted in RD are very likely not going to be the same as the legacies who they can get in ED, up to a certain limit at least.

Again, the general theme here is thinking about whether or not it is likely that college can easily replace someone they defer in ED out of the RD pool. That is most likely to be true if this is just a common sort of pretty good applicant that they will see a lot of again in RD, and for whom they are confident they have a reasonably good RD yield model. Conversely, if they are looking at types of applicants where they are not confident there will be sufficient equivalent substitutes available our of RD admits given the applicable yield model–then that is a reason to favor admitting them ED.

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6126

Re: Grinnell. In years past, if you make the preliminary cut, there WILL be an an “optional” supplemental essay that is requested later in the process. I love Grinnell and I am actually an alum. The location never bothered me one bit.

6127

Let’s put athletic recruiting aside for a second because it is such a different process. (For example, information is disclosed earlier by both sides - including through admissions pre-reads.) I think what you are arguing is that any institutional priority essentially functions in the same way as athletic recruiting: the college has decided that it wants a candidate with a certain type of characteristic (legacy, URM, humanities major, male, skilled artist, etc.) and that characteristic is important enough to the college that it feels too risky to wait and take its chances in the RD round. They would prefer to lock in a possibly somewhat less impressive candidate with that characteristic earlier. According to that model, colleges would choose to have an ED round as a tool to meet their institutional priorities. Since - outside of a select few characteristics like athlete status and URM - most applicants have no way of knowing a school’s various institutional priorities that year, these applicants cannot assume that their ED acceptance chances are higher than they would be in the RD round. In that world, the unhooked applicant would have no incentive to apply ED unless they are absolutely certain that the college is their top choice and they do not feel as if they incur any type of cost by applying ED. That would seem to be a rare applicant given imperfect information about college fit, which can be reduced via more targeted research after admission, and the option value of choice. Why then are so many qualified, unhooked applicants applying ED and why are their counselors advising them to do so? Maybe they simply don’t understand the admissions process, and a school like Williams is trying to educate them when it says that there is no advantage to apply ED? Or is there a reliable way of predicting a specific college’s institutional priorities that I am missing?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, which makes this whole admissions process both stressful and fascinating. But I do suspect that the story is a little more complicated. For one thing, most institutional priorities do not seem nearly as black and white as the need to replace a quarterback. I suspect that in the case of most institutional priorities a college would be fine if it came up short one year as long as the numbers work out in the longer run. In that case, the ED round would be far less helpful. Where ED is undoubtedly helpful though is in managing yield and in ensuring that the school enrolls a sufficient number of qualified students. In a world where ED is a yield management tool, it does make sense for qualified candidates to apply ED to a low reach school they like, even if they are not sure that it is their absolute favorite (depending on the candidate’s degree of risk aversion).

As an aside: I do not think that colleges encourage legacy students to apply ED because they want to make sure they meet certain legacy targets as an institutional priority. I suspect colleges like legacies as a way of building a long-term support for their organization (similar to how unions have historically given preferred admission to the children of members). In that case the legacy student who feels strongly enough about the school to commit to it early would be preferable to the legacy student who adds the school to the mix as a hedge because he/she thinks they may have an admissions advantage there.

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6128

That is a very good, and challenging, question for people who see things like I do.

I don’t think the why families and kids would see things differently thing is too hard to explain. There are some pretty basic raw statistics that many such people seem to be discussing as representing an automatic boost. And people like me who question that theory seem relatively underrepresented in such discussions.

But I have a lot of respect for experienced counselors, and so to the extent they have a different message, I am much less confident in dismissing their advice. I do have a somewhat complex theory about what is going on, but I don’t know how satisfying it is, so I won’t belabor it. But in a nutshell, my premise is college counselors are if anything even more inclined than I am to see a very broad range of outcomes as good outcomes, and therefore see very little downside to applying ED at least as long as the ED school would be affordable. And therefore to the extent it makes families and kids feel like they took their best shots, that is something they might happily support even if it is not at all clear there really is any sort of universal advantage.

A final thought I would add is that while I think the Tufts Syndrome/yield-protection theory logically only applies to a narrow band of colleges in certain popular markets, it happens that a lot of the people you will find in certain online circles have “target” or “likely” colleges in that band in those markets. And they may well be right that those particular colleges will be much more likely to admit them ED.

Again, my suggested solution to that is not to apply ED to one of those colleges if it is not your clear favorite, it is to look for colleges with similar (or indeed higher) virtues that are not in such popular markets where Tufts Syndrome isn’t an issue.

But my experience is a lot of the people looking to get into the popular markets just are not receptive to such suggestions, and it would not surprise me if college counselors often encounter the same issue.

So I think it can be helpful to look at some examples where even the raw stats show ED is not much of a boost, and then think about what these examples are illuminating.

One of my favorite such examples is Rochester. Rochester has a lot of virtues. It is an R1 university, it has a really nice campus, it has a very cool curriculum approach, it supports a lot of research for undergrads (including non-STEM) . . . just on paper a very desirable sort of college.

However, Rochester is of course in upstate New York, it gets a lot of snow, and in general I think it is fair to say it is not in a particularly desirable location from a national perspective. And of course it is not an Ivy League or NESCAC school.

OK, so here are Rochester’s stats from the latest CDS:

ED: 1437 applicants, 614 admitted (42.7%), presumably almost all enrolled.

Non-ED: 18496 applicants, 7136 admitted (38.6%), approximately 1011 enrolled (14.2% yield).

OK, so first, obvious observation–even the raw difference in admissions rates is trivial, and very likely just the result of the different composition of the applicant pools.

Second, Rochester could not fill its target class of around 1625 people will all ED applicants even if it wanted to, because it didn’t get enough. And even admitting over 40% of its ED applicants, it still had over 1000 spots to fill in RD.

But then its yield in RD is predictably low, because it has some notable competitive disadvantages. So it had to admit 7 people RD for every 1 they needed to actually enroll.

OK, so that to me supports my baseline assumptions about ED. Rochester can’t fill its classes with qualified ED applicants, and it also can’t afford to try to yield protect. It instead has to admit the applicants it wants in both ED and RD, and then fight for the RD admits, which it does with things like robust merit programs.

So why are so many people convinced there is an ED boost? Well, let’s look at another college that I personally consider no better than a peer of Rochester, except it is in the most desirable college market in the US, maybe the world–Boston. Namely Northeastern:

ED: 2707 applicants, 890 admitted (32.9%).

non-ED: 88293 applicants, 5301 admitted (6.0%), approximately 1629 enrolled (30.7% yield).

OK, so, not so different ED, actually. Northeastern is a bigger school, it gets more ED applicants, but it admits close to the same percentage as Rochester. Which makes sense in that the people who actually have Northeastern or Rochester as their top choice are a select group. And while Northeastern technically could barely fill its class through ED, realistically the ED applicants it wants still leaves it with like 1600 spots to fill in RD.

But then there is a CRAZY difference in RD. Northeastern gets 4.77 times as many RD applications as Rochester. Now, this is in part because Northeastern encourages that. But still, that is a radically different situation.

But then Northeastern has a much higher RD yield. How? It basically MUST be selecting RD admits in part based on yield. AKA Tufts Syndrome.

And by the way, I don’t really believe Northeastern is doing that only, or mostly, to look better. I think it is doing that mostly because they likely believe with good reason they actually end up with the best class that way, that instead admitting a bunch of people extremely unlikely to yield and then waiting it out and then going to the waitlist for large numbers of enrolled students would be suboptimal.

OK, so if Northeastern is high enough on your list, but not the top, might you want to strategically apply ED to Northeastern? Yeah, maybe, I get why you would think that.

But again, my suggested solution would be–why not apply to Rochester instead? Or, like, apply RD to both Rochester and Northeastern. And if it doesn’t work out at Northeastern because they mistakenly yield protect you, there is a very good chance you will get into Rochester instead, because they don’t yield protect.

But also again, my experience is a lot of kids/families will respond–yeah, OK, but I really want to go to college in Boston, not upstate New York. And indeed, that is where a lot of my friends are applying, and other people from my school, and I’d just rather strategically ED at Northeastern.

And OK, sure, if that is what you really want. But the Rochester alternative does exist, for people willing to consider it.

6129

All things being equal why wouldn’t a college prefer the applicant who has said I love you the best of all the rest? I’d much rather have a class that said you’re my first choice, I am thrilled to be here, rather than a class full of kids saying, well you were my fifth choice but I didn’t get into the other four so here I am chip on my shoulder and all. While being fully aware that the plural of anecdote is not data most of the kids we know who got into their first choices did ED. Some of the others had good choices at the end - arguably better choices- but didn’t get into their first, and often second, choices (albeit are happy where they ended up in the end). For my kid, as I’ve said before, the relief of knowing the process was over and she was all set in December was immeasurable. It would have been extraordinarily stressful for her to wait until March. She was happy to withdraw apps and couldn’t have cared less about finding out whether or not she was accepted other places. But she only really applied to one reach - and her stats were right in line with who they normally accept - and that was her ED school. I know there are many who don’t mind waiting as much - or who like having a string of acceptances to choose from - or who really don’t have a first choice - but for my kid who knew her first choice and the NPC said we could afford it, ED was great.

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6130

I’m sure they would, but as usual all else is rarely equal.

The fact is we know a lot of people don’t get admitted to their top choice college. Nor their second choice for that matter. And so on.

But a lot of those people are great applicants, they just had really selective colleges at the top of their list, and it didn’t work out.

And many, many colleges are happy to get such people. Because, to be blunt, the applicants who do not have such ambitions are not necessarily their best applicants. Some are, and it is great when an applicant they really want also has them as their top choice. But they tend to run out of such applicants, and then happily fill the remainder of their classes with great applicants who were not admitted to colleges they preferred.

Incidentally, the very existence of ED II is proof of this concept. The whole point of ED II is that colleges know you will likely only apply ED II if you are rejected by your ED I/REA college. And they are fine with that! A lot of great applicants are rejected by their ED I/REA college, and if they offer ED II, they are telling you they will welcome you with open arms in ED II–assuming they like you enough.

So big picture, most colleges happily accept a lot of people who did not have them as their first choice, because those end up being some of their best applicants. Meaning often not all else is equal.

Which is obviously a perfectly fine use of ED. I am a skeptic about unhooked people using ED strategically, by which I mean the college is not in fact their top choice, but they ED anyway because they think it gives them an automatic boost. But if you are just applying ED because you have a clear favorite that would be comfortably affordable for your family, I see nothing at all wrong with that. Because I agree it could be great if that works out.

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6131

I asked our counsellor about ED and its benefits for unhooked students or ORM students. And here is what she said is her rule of thumb if a school is admitting above 50% via ED and they have 2.5X or above advantage in admit rates with ED then her general rule of thumb is there is advantage even for unhooked students with ED. Some clear examples are the privates below the T20: example: NYU, North eastern, Emroy, Santa Clara and so on.

I think we need to make the call based on college you are looking at and then make a call rather than assume that there is a advantage or no it does not help.

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6132

This makes a lot of sense to me. The part that is not satisfying about it is that I suspect everyone has somewhat different rules of thumb. For example, our counselor recommends ED also for top SLACs, which have a more than 2.5x higher acceptance rate in the ED round but admit less than 50% of students via ED, so would not quite meet your counselor’s threshold. In the end, I suspect that it is not possible to find firm, data-based guidance about the right ED strategy for many schools. We all have to go with our own best judgment. Which of course allows for endless discussions about the topic :slightly_smiling_face: !

6133

I’m sure many counselors feel this way. But this theory does not seem consistent with the fact that some counselors, including ours, seem to actively encourage an ED application. The assumption at my kid’s school is that you will apply somewhere ED or REA, unless there is a concern about the junior year reports. I’m sure the counselors are fully supportive of any student who prefers not to make an ED commitment, but it is not what they advise. I have seen arguments that at some schools counselors look to optimize the outcome for the class as a whole, rather than for any individual student, and like to steer students to different schools so that they don’t compete with each other. But that has not been my observation at our school - we were not steered to any one particular school, or even set of schools, at all.

I suspect that the whole ED calculus if different for the schools that Jeff Selingo calls “buyer” schools, i.e. the schools that are working hard to attract applicants by giving merit aid and the like. Rochester seems to be such a school. (By the way, I agree with you that Rochester has a lot to offer. It happens to be a school that our counselors are pushing hard for a lot of students usually as either a likely or target school. S24 has not been interested so far, mostly because he prefers smaller schools.)

6134

My son is acting like if a school is offering merit that they must not be good.

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6135

Affordable schools are good.

Schools that you take advantage of are good regardless of rating.

Many fine publics and privates offer merit.

Your son is talking to the wrong people :slight_smile:

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6136

Yes not all colleges will fall into exactly her threshold and it not as simple as that but she said it’s quick check for us to keep in mind but adjust as needed. For example she did say NYU ED admit rate is only 2.1X but they take 67% of the class through ed and Notre dame takes 80% class through restricted EA but ED admit rate is only 1.7x of RD and in these cases she would still apply ED if its a top choice.

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6137

On the topic of ED, I happened to come across this very interesting article today:

It is 20 years old, so I would take it with a grain of salt, but all of the trends and incentives in the college admissions process that it describes are still applicable today. The only parts that seem a little quaint in retrospect are the examples of “low” admissions rates at selective schools. It is the best discussion of ED that I have found to date, and provides an interesting description of the history of ED. It is hard to come away from this article with anything but a cynical attitude towards the early admissions game. (Not to mention that it confirmed for me that S24 should absolutely send in an ED application.)

It is a long article, but here is the part I found most interesting:

The real question about the ED skew is whether the prospects for any given student differ depending on when he or she applies. Last fall Christopher Avery, of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and several colleagues produced smoking-gun evidence that they do. The authors analyzed five years’ worth of admissions records from fourteen selective colleges, involving a total of 500,000 applications, and interviewed 400 college students, sixty high school seniors, and thirty-five counselors. They found that at the ED schools an early application was worth as much in the competition for admission as scoring 100 extra points on the SAT. For instance, a student with a combined SAT score of 1400 to 1490 (out of 1600) who applied early was as likely to be accepted as a regular-admission student scoring 1500 to 1600. An early student scoring 1200 to 1290 was more likely to be accepted than a regular student scoring 1300 to 1390.

(…)The Avery study’s findings were the more striking because what admissions officers refer to as “hooked” applicants were excluded from the study. These are students given special consideration, and therefore likely to be admitted despite lower scores, because of “legacy” factors (alumni parents or other relatives, plus past or potential donations from the family), specific athletic recruiting, or affirmative action.

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6138

Wait, really? I thought it every one got it. Regardless, I think it’s a test of interest and MUST be answered.

6139

Strategy is critical to college applications, couple considérations which came into the fold

  • consider/pursue/accept recruit route (very large advantage), legacy route (marginal advantage), donor route (makes sense for billionaires)
  • very few applicants have the bandwidth to write very good essays for 20+schools without diluting their quality. Curate carefully
  • Some high schools actual have their own restrictions. examples include a cap of 10 applications, or a maximum of only one early round school (ED, REA, EA)
  • HS class rank and profile influences where you apply ED/REA: if you know there is a large number of better students from your high school applying to Harvard REA, then maybe you’re better off with Cornell ED, and applying to Harvard RD if not to many classmates got into Harvard
  • because the majority of schools offer an advantage to early applicants, building a larger early application list through ED/EAs/ED2 offers a substantial probabilistic advantage. A list could look like Dartmouth (ED), Chicago / Colorado College / Notre Dame / Northeastern (EA), Bowdoin (ED2). This strategy also offers the advantage of spreading the applications more evenly between the early & regular cycles.
    This isn’t recommended if one expects a substantial improvement in grades/SAT/ACT in the first semester of senior year
  • even though they say optional, NEVER go optional if you can get your scores up to 1550/35. Equally, do not report if your scores are below a school’s median (some will say top 75%)
  • safety: for students with strong academics, the top Canadian schools offer a process largely driven by grades which is much more predictable/less holistic, have a substantially lower full pay cost (less than 50% of US colleges), and are academically stronger than most US schools with a 50% admit rate (which many counselors classify as safety). Their application cycle is simple and convenient, with the only drawback being that their acceptance can be rolling, with the strongest candidates accepted first.
  • if one is rejected everywhere, there are still many alternatives to build a successful pathway through work (https://youtu.be/x07WT0VYLw0?feature=shared), productive gap year with college application, military service with college application

Good luck to everyone.

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6140

And in case anyone wants to dig into the actual study, here it is:

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6141

The question of “is it easier” is up to interpretation IMO and colleges take advantage of that to best suit them.

To the college:
Is it easier? No, because that are scrutinizing your application the same way. That is what colleges are saying, and they are not getting into statistical probabilities.

To the CC:
Is it easier? Yes, because you are first in line to fill whatever bucket the college has to fill.

6142

Just one correction, Notre Dame is REA and you cannot apply to any other schools EA or ED if you apply REA to Notre Dame. You would not be able to apply there if you did ED or EA somewhere else.

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6143

That is a list that would cause me to side eye the applicant a bit and wonder if they know what they are actually looking for. There is almost nothing connecting those schools to one another.

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