@KingdomOfRust Yes you would be able to.
Hey guys! Another P’Ton hopeful! Anyone here from Africa?
@52balletvieta But if accepted, I would not be able to, right?
@franticmanatee Your response regarding not applying for financial aid will not affect your application in any way. A stellar arts supplement will help an application but mediocre ones will not. You need to decide which category you would fall into and if deferred I am sure it can still be submitted later.
@KingdomOfRust If you’re accepted you still may also because Princeton is non-binding. ED any school is binding. So if you get into that school, you just can’t choose to go to Princeton anymore.
@Cantiger could you possibly clarify what “stellar” consists of?
But isn’t Princeton single-choice early action? I’m a bit confused by what single-choice early action means…
@KingdomOfRust SCEA just means that you can only apply to that school early action, which is non binding. Early decision, however is separate and binding.
If you were to ED a school while SCEA-ing Princeton, there would be an issue, but if you apply after the SCEA decision then its no problem.
@Cantiger Thanks so much! This relieves some of my anxiety. Do you think that a subpar arts supplement can actually hurt your application?
@KingdomOfRust @52balletvieta SCEA means that you can only apply to that PRIVATE school early action.
At many public schools it may place you at a severe disadvantage for scholarships or admission to competitive programs (ie engineering) if you apply in the regular decision cycle. Princeton doesn’t want to hold people back from applying to those schools, so it allows you to apply to public schools in Early Action as well. That’s why the one commenter earlier could apply to GATech, and I applied to all four of the public schools I applied to by the Nov.1 deadline.
SCEA is just to prevent people from applying to HYP all at once in EA. If you thought the wait for decisions was long, just imagine if everyone cross-applied. It would be chaos for the admissions officers, and it wouldn’t be possible to determine if the school was actually a given student’s first choice or not, so yield would go down, and good students who were set on Princeton could be passed over for someone who applied to Princeton as a strong backup, but will choose to go to Harvard instead.
So you can apply to places like GATech, uMich, BigStateU, UCB/LA, but not places like Harvard, Yale, MIT, uChicago, etc. Not all of the top private schools have that single choice restriction, but it only takes one.
@CautiousOptimist whoops forgot to mention that point. I applied to multiple public places early. Thanks for pointing that out!
@CautiousOptimist Again, just wanting to make sure that I don’t mess this up, but if I get my Princeton SCEA decision back and am accepted, there would be no issue if I then applied Early Decision 2 to Harvey Mudd, correct? As clarification, I have yet to submit ED2 to Harvey Mudd. Also, thank you both so much for your help with clarifying this 
@KingdomOfRust Princeton’s web site says that “you may not apply to an early program at any other private college or university.” It doesn’t really make any distinction between EA, ED1 or ED2, so I would assume it would still be prohibited. You could ask admissions, but if you wanted to commit to Harvey Mudd why didn’t you just apply ED1 there?
If you got in you would be forced to forfeit your slot at Princeton, so it kind of seems like taking advantage of the system if you were to do that.
@CautiousOptimist Yeah I agree that it seems weird, I didn’t want to do early decision since it seemed scary at first, but after talking to a few professors at HM yesterday, it’s definitely my first choice now. I don’t think I’ll do ED2 if offered admission to Princeton since it does seem skeevy, but I think I will if I get deferred.
@KingdomOfRust That seems fair. Also if ED2 announces earlier than your other colleges and you get accepted, consider sending a message to withdraw your application to other schools just out of courtesy. If HMC accepts you then you can’t go anywhere else, and it would make someone’s day if they could have your spot instead of having it simply go unclaimed!
@CautiousOptimist Awesome, thank you so much for your help/advice man :). You’ve eased my anxiety about this process a lot. Best of luck to you in the college admissions process :). And you too @52balletvieta
So I did some research about stats for previous years and found:
Acceptance Rates for Early Applicants
Class of 2016 - 726/3443 21%
Class of 2017 - 697/3810 18.3%
Class of 2018 - 714/3854 18.5%
Class of 2019 - 767/3850 19.9%
Class of 2020 - ???/4164
Acceptance Numbers for Total Applicants
Class of 2015 - 2282
Class of 2016 - 2095
Class of 2017 - 1931
Class of 2018 - 1939
Class of 2019 - 1908
Class of 2020 - ?
What do you guys think? Since Class of 2016 is graduating this year, won’t there be more spots for this year’s applicants?
Trying to be hopeful here… X_X
@hrim1014 Oh gosh, thank you… even if this doesn’t really matter, it still makes me feel slightly better about my chances.
On another note, I couldn’t take it anymore and finally emailed the Financial Aid Office to make sure they received the tax forms. I know asking for a confirmation doesn’t count, but I guess I just wanted one anyway. At this point I doubt they would’ve sent me a confirmation if I didn’t request one.
@cinnamonwings You can tell how nervous I am. Like actually, who would spend their time doing this omg help
@hrim1014 Sorry, but I don’t think you’ll find any such luck. The class of 2016 has 1300 students, 2017 has 1357 students, 2018 has 1285 and 2019 has 1312. All data from the official CDS. The university seems to be targeting 1300 enrolled students per class. It seems that over the past few years they have been able to improve yield, meaning they can send fewer applications.
Sorry to bring negativity, I just love going over the stats. Wait, no I don’t, but I use it to procrastinate.
If you want some more friendly stats, I did the numbers and for my particular SAT score (2400) I determined that there were approximately 22,000 students with a better or equal score (doesn’t account for superscores AFAIK), and not that many spots across the gamut of top-rated schools I’m hoping to apply to.
Another consideration is that within the Ivy-League alone, over 30,000 people are applying, with top students being distributed among them. Not to mention places like MIT, uChicago, Stanford where students can’t cross-apply to Princeton (yet). So the top students are relatively well diluted, meaning there’s more room for you to stand out in the EA period.