Question about schools with both Early Action and Early Decision, especially when such a school also has a strong reputation for factoring demonstrated interest and yield protection into admission decisions. As an example, Case Western.
The question is, if you are unwilling to do ED to such a school, is more beneficial to apply EA or RD or neutral? When a student has a choice between EA and ED, picking EA kind of implies “not my first choice.” At least with RD there can be a presumption the student either didn’t get their first choice or truly is undecided.
The alternative, mutually exclusive theory is that Case knows a lot of students won’t make them their first choice but if they provide a path toward getting an acceptance to a strong match school early, the student may stop applying to other matches or safeties and attend if they don’t get their top reaches.
I disagree that EA doesn’t mean first choice. For many it means first choice if it’s affordable or the best deal.
I think people overplay yield management, especially at a school like Case.
Their yield is 16%. That includes ED so EA / RD is lower. So they haven’t a clue who is going to , just who is demonstrating interest.
This low yield is likely why they put a full 1/3 of applicants on the WL - so in case they royally screw up in predicting who will accept that they have an enormous wait list….which likely has an even lower yield of those admitted.
I do think schools that have both EA and ED who meet full need do assume the student applied ED elsewhere…especially if it’s a high stat student and/or the student didn’t apply for financial aid.
That’s why we see meet full need schools like Chicago and CWRU defer a ton of kids in the EA round…because they don’t want to admit a student who received an ED admission. And students might not have pulled their apps before Chicago and CWRU EA decisions are out because students don’t have to pull apps until they commit to the ED school (usually within in two weeks of the admission).
So the example of this for us is Miami. Deferred. Then accepted.
We have no need. But then why not reject us outright.
I guess I’m saying that if less than 1/6 of accepted attend and it’s likely 1/7, 1/8 etc of taking out ED - and their waitlist is another 30%+ of all applicants…I just think they don’t have any decent predictive analytics.
May not be applicable to all schools that offer EA and ED simultaneously, but at Chicago, CWRU and Northeastern (to name a few) there is a much higher chance of deferral for EA; followed by waitlisting if application not switched to ED2.
Unless applicant is hooked or fills some niche for the college.
Because your kid was in the ballpark. Once they received their RD applicants, perhaps the group wasn’t as strong as they thought it would be…so they accepted your kid in the RD round.
Yet my daughters bf was accepted EA and not deferred. Same stats, same financial situation.
I see the logic others have said but to me the EA deferral brings a lot of risk - that even if the school accepts them later, that the student would have already moved on. Mine had - zero chance she was going to Miami after the deferral. We didn’t even visit. She had eliminated it b4 the acceptance came, even when I told her I was confident she’d be admitted and with $25k merit.
I don’t think the colleges have a handle on this, hence other than the elites, have tiny yields and in many cases crazy large wait lists.
With kids applying to so many schools and playing the interest game with all that require it, they simply don’t know.
Well…they didn’t have identical applications…essays, LOR, ECs, etc.
My kid applied EA everywhere she could and so did my other kid. Both were accepted in the EA rounds. One attended one of the EA schools.
ED was not on the table in this family because kids just can change so much…and also, our kids wanted time to make their final decisions.
Colleges know that some students choose EA for that reason…they want time to make their final decisions…but also are happy to have acceptances in the bag.
The issue at Chicago and Northeastern is that acceptance rates in the RD round are in the low single digits (even though we don’t know all the details by round, we often know how many students were accepted in ED and EA and can do the math).
CWRU likely has a higher RD acceptance rate than the other two schools, but they place such a high priority on demonstrated interest I would be wary to apply RD (unless there was a good reason like needing to show better grades). But still CWRU RD is a reach for most students.
RD is also used to fill out institutional priorities that haven’t been filled in the other rounds, and this can vary from year to year. This is where the schools are trying to pick up more POC, or first gen, or pell grant students, or whatever they still need per their (opaque) institutional priorities.
So basically if you don’t do ED1/ED2, don’t bother perhaps? (Or at the very least treat it as a long shot Hail Mary regardless of qualifications.)
All of this contributes to why I am not a fan of ED/REA/SCEA in general. It’s contributing to the death of the “match/target” category of schools. Everything is now reach or safety, because if a student is not willing to forgo applying to reaches and commit to a single match up-front, the matches become reaches in RD. It’s such a poor position to put students in – a one-sided “commit to us before you know if we’ll commit to you.”
If the schools really wanted early binding commitments that weren’t exploitive to students they should only have an early process that is totally unrestrictive to where else you apply early, then schools can make early binding offers to those they want from the early applicant pool that the students have a few weeks to accept or not. If they don’t, the offer expires. That way the school still gets binding applicants early on but students are not forced to make any binding decisions without certainty it is reciprocal. Colleges could recalibrate their RD round based on how much they filled in the early round. This ultimately is much closer to the system ED replaced decades ago – when elite colleges visited the elite private schools and gave them early reads – but this time available to all applicants.
Or just stick with an EA/RD level playing field.
But of course this would require the colleges to care about student welfare which of course is a fantasy.
Sorry @thumper and other but I disagree. Again, you have kids who get deferred who self eliminate. I get the argument that if they defer, you might reject them b4 they accept you, thus helping their yield.
But their yield, including ED, is less than 1/6 at CWRU. Many schools note that if you wait to RD, your chances of merit are less. Some schools, like W&L and Emory make their RD almost an EA in order to get merit - in other words you have to apply earlier.
CWRU has no clue on who will or won’t accept. Why else would you offer 33% of applicants a wait list spot?
I have no doubt that they try to optimize their admissions. But clearly, they don’t know how to.
Now other schools - Emory is 34% yield but again that includes ED. I don’t know but would imagine they have more ED admits than CWRU based on the higher rank. Their WL was offered to almost a fifth of applicants, so a much lower percentage. With a yield more than 2x CWRU, clearly their brand is stronger. .
Since I mentioned Miami, they have a 23% yield (including ED / sports) and offered more than 13k or 30% a wait list spot.
Why ??
I can only guess it’s because they don’t really know so they WL what seems to be any one (yes I know they reject kids too).
I can see your side but I don’t believe it because by deferring to protect yield, they are pushing kids in another direction and thus hurting yield.
My high stat student applied EA to Case and was accepted. She did demonstrate strong interest. She did fall into the bucket of being accepted to her ED school and declined the acceptance.
Our experience was like yours. Our son applied EA at every school on his list that offered the option and was accepted at all, without deferral and with merit. All of those schools also offered ED, but our son wasn’t ready to make that kind of commitment to any school at that point. With all of the strategizing that goes on regarding ED, I think people sometimes forget there are still kids who put a priority on having options, as well as families that want to wait and see regarding financial aid. From our experience, it seemed that at least some schools were willing to roll with that.