I’m not sure this is the case. Do we have this data?
ETA: As for possibly preventing someone from applying ED, that might happen for a select few, but ED is just not an option for most families.
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I don’t get it.
If the student preferred another school that offered ED, why would applying EA to CWRU impact that option…short of the few that don’t allow like Harvard.
I personally do think EA (in general) gives better overall odds than RD. The reality is the school still brings in earlier commitments. I’m sure many - as in my daughters class - committed to UGA and U Miami right away after acceptance once merit was seen - using two that defer regularly. So it helps them determine how many spots are left for RD.
Because someone thinks CWRU should have taken them doesn’t necessitate they should have. I think that’s what started the debate. Colleges are building a student body…a baseball team if you will. Maybe they had too many first baseman and were looking for a left fielder…and the initial OP didn’t make the first cut.
CWRU isn’t telling anyone, but it doesn’t claim it boosts the chance of admission over RD either.
No excuses. But trying to game the system- and then complaining when the gamesmanship fails- is a little ironic, no?
Your description of this students gyrations are so complicated I can’t even keep up- she didn’t know EA to CW was no better than RD, she missed the opportunity… what? This is not what ED/EA was designed for. You’re trying to play three dimensional chess here.
Kid has a first choice college. Great. Apply early. YOU are the one concocting these elaborate scenarios where someone is missing out on something due to the college’s bad though legal behavior. Most kids know- they want to go to Bowdoin above all else. Great, that’s a first choice. U Maine is their safety- great, apply regular decision. Or they want to go to Cooper Union-- but they really need to see if the fantastic financial deal at Cooper Union is better than what they’d get from the Engineering school at their flagship, U Conn. great- apply to both regular and see what happens.
Why pile on the stress with these endless scenarios of who gets to play which card and why is the college confounding their efforts to play out multiple scenarios in real time? At the end of the day- despite the complications, the games, the cards, the baroque complaints about barely legal behavior- each kid can only attend one college. So it honestly does boil down to a simple decision tree IF (and only if) a kid has done a good job figuring out a true financial and admissions safety. For all the effort put into timing out and maximizing someone’s fictitious ED card- why not put that effort into identifying a true safety school???
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That’s a stretch then to state that there’s no benefit to applying EA vs RD. We have no idea of the relative acceptance rates, no idea whether deferred EA applicants have a higher acceptance rates than RD applicants…and I am ok with schools not providing these details. I generally agree with blossom that it’s not as complicated as some are making it seem to be, nor is there any harm to any applicants.
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I’m sure you’ve been on this forum a long time. If you take a look at the posts from the students (and their parents) on this forum, how many of them aren’t looking for an admission boost from their early applications?
The idea that they should only apply early if they have a clear first choice is too theoretical for most of them.
Then it’s on the rational grownups here to help them find a true safety, and identify “If you love Middlebury you’d also love X” colleges. There are students who don’t have a snowball’s chance in god knows where applying to ridiculously out of reach colleges “so I don’t waste my ED chance”. Kiddo- you’ve only wasted the application fee, because you ain’t getting in. THAT you can take to the bank. Why can’t we all try to stop this behavior?
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Why is this on the parents? Why can’t the students/applicants do the research/legwork here? There the ones that have to live with their decisions…
I don’t think this is about not having a safety at all. These students may already have a safety or two, but they’re still looking to get into a better college.
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The chance of EA acceptance to CWRU is low, very low, at least for certain types of students. I personally know multiple students who were accepted by multiple of the most elite colleges but deferred and/or waitlisted by CWRU.
Because it is dictated appropriately by the quality of the applicant pool, specific students, institutional needs, desired diversity, etc. It is not preordained nor should it be.
Most importantly EA at CWRU is not misrepresented, the school simply describes it for what it is…
Not sure how you can be damaged by being told the truth. EA simply means you get an answer early.
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Jeff Selingo’s book Who Gets In and Why explains how an applicant in EA and ED can have an advantage merely by being first in line. RD is used to fill out the class, so a candidate with a similar profile to students already accepted in the early round might be passed over for someone that adds something different to the class mix.
So a student can use ED strategically, but the students most able to take advantage of that strategy are students with a head start on researching college choices and ones who can afford to leave money on the table (that is, from families that are comfortable not comparing merit offers and/or satisfied the ED school will meet their full need on their terms). Generally, these are privileged/wealthier families.
I wonder if some deferrals of high stats impressive candidates in the EA/ED round can be attributed to a desire to diversify the class socio-economically and geographically more than a matter of yield management/protection.
Schools believe they need to offer EA/ED to capture the interest of the most possible students, but may also feel pressure to add diversity and think they need to leave spots open for more RD round applicants to do that. Just a theory.
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But we can’t draw that conclusion based only on the students you know.
I have zero problem with CWRU not accepting top students with high stats…for whatever reasons. Clearly these students weren’t harmed. I promise you the non-acceptances for at least some of these students were not due to only yield considerations.
If they thought CWRU was a safety for them, they didn’t do their research.
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The students I know actually were advised to demonstrate sufficient interest. They did, IMO. They had high stats but they also had other accomplishments, which may have done them harm in this case.
Sure, a lack of demonstrated interest could lead to a deferral or non-acceptance at CWRU. But I was speaking in a much broader sense…there are many more reasons why CWRU might not admit a high stats student. That’s the thing about holistic admissions, fitting the institutional priorities is necessary to be admitted.
Holistic admissions can be unpredictable, even for the students who have done everything correctly. Best case, for high stats students, is that CWRU is a match/target school. Most applicants experience some denials from target schools…in other words, getting a denial from a target school is not a surprising result.
So then the “harm” is that someone found out in the EA round that they were rejected instead of waiting until the RD round to find out?
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No. I personally haven’t seen anyone rejected by CWRU in their EA round. All deferrals.
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Then these kids were unharmed and were using CWRU as a “backup” which means CWRU made the right decision from its point of view in deferring, denying or WL admissions for them. If CWRU were a true first choice, they should have ED’d. If they couldn’t for FA reasons, again they were unharmed since they had higher ranked choices whose FA package would likely be equivalent or better than CWRU. In honesty, a lot of this seems to be a case of bruised ego’s of parents or kids who did not get into a school they felt should have accepted them and therefore could only brag about getting accepted into “3” colleges instead of “7”.
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I know you’re a lawyer but I wasn’t using the word “harm” in the legal sense. I used it to mean that they weren’t accepted.
CWRU yield protection was covered in the CWRU 2022 thread in great detail. The pattern that emerged was that exceptional students (~1600SAT/4.0UW/strong ECs), whose likely first choice was a higher rated university like CalTech were deferred by Case with an invitation to apply ED II. The consensus seemed to be that CWRU knew these kids were using it as a safety, and did not want extend offers to students who were not likely to accept. Students whose stats were more in line with CWRU students historic profiles were accepted, and even offered money.
If your son really wants to attend Case, he should re-submit ED II. My guess is that they will accept him and thrown a pile of merit cash his way.
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