<p>Parents: There are two schools of thoughts on this topic. One group is telling me that the big name colleges will defer most of the eligible/good applicants who they can not accept in SCEA/EA. Unless the candidate is really below mark, the colleges defer them to RD.</p>
<p>The other group is telling me that usually most big name colleges will accept one or two, defer only a few and reject the rest (which happens to be the most of the population).
Our school district is a good one sending 12-13 kids to Ivies every year. Now that I think, lot of kids got deferred last year from SCEA/EA. But is this norm?</p>
<p>I just want to know. My s wants to apply SCEA. Want to get educated on what to expect. Can any one comment?</p>
<p>The answer is: it depends on the school. Most schools seem to fall in the first category (but more below), and a few in the second category.</p>
<p>We do have access to data regarding the number accepted, rejected and deferred in the EA applicant pool, so we can categorize the schools as above. But we don't typically have data on the admit rate of ea applicants deferred. My sense in watching this for years is that, out of the first group above, a deferred candidate has a lower chance of admissions than a RD candidate in the regular round. In other words, deferred? start shopping for alternatives, because the first choice ain't gonna happen.</p>
<p>It is very easy for kids to apply to their dream school SCEA, and then wait for the miracle to happen. when it does not, there is a mad scramble that leads to a horrible Christmas break...</p>
<p>Far better to keep on plugging even after the SCEA app is sent, but hard to do when you are 17!</p>
<p>Stanford's historical tendency has been to give more definite decisions to its early group (that is, to defer fewer and to reject more) than other colleges do. That still seems to be Stanford's practice under the new admissions dean Richard Shaw. Many other colleges with early admission rounds resolve all doubts in favor of deferring to the regular round. You asked about SCEA in your thread title--only Yale and Stanford have SCEA this year. </p>
<p>After edit: The more important issue for your son is, does he already have his application to this safety college filled out? Has he sent that in, on a "rolling" basis, already?</p>
<p>MIT was one of the few schools that was fairly transparent about how many got accepted from the early action group. If you look at the overall numbers almost half the class had originally applied EA, even though most of them were deferred from the early round. Hard to know if those were stronger applicants, or if kids sent in more materials after getting deferred, or if applications looked better for getting two looks, or if MIT reacted subtley to the fact that kids wanted to apply enough to get done early. It wasn't SCEA which I like better. I think EA is a no-brainer if it's available, but SCEA is a little more difficult to suss out. Definitely don't count on getting in SCEA - my son was deferred then rejected from both his EA schools.</p>
<p>The past will be a pretty imperfect guide for Yale and Stanford this year, since the dynamics of their applicant pools will probably be significantly different. I think everyone expects their SCEA applications to increase by about 50%, or 6,000 applications (i.e., that most of the kids who would otherwise have applied SCEA to Harvard or ED to Princeton will apply SCEA to either Yale or Stanford). They are unlikely to increase the percentage of their classes they accept early -- historically, it's been about 1/3. So that makes one expect a much lower admit rate from the SCEA pool, and many more highly qualified applicants not accepted then. That may lead them to reject more borderline candidates at the SCEA stage.</p>
<p>However, on the other hand their total application pools, SCEA and RD, should not increase that much at all -- probably by 3-4% maximum, something that could get lost in the noise of normal year-to-year variations. The only net additional applications they should expect to receive are from (a) about 600 students who would have been accepted ED at Princeton in past years, and thus would not have applied to any other school, and (b) a much small number of students who would have been accepted SCEA at Harvard and would have decided not to bother applying to Yale, Stanford, or both. Those hypothetical students aren't all going to apply to both colleges, or even necessarily to one of them. So the RD round should look pretty much the same as it has the past few years. That suggests that the colleges might feel comfortable deferring a large number of SCEA applicants to the RD round -- perhaps even more, on a percentage basis, than they did in the past.</p>
<p>Finally, I think both schools are sensitive to criticisms about the disparity between their EA acceptance rates and their RD acceptance rates (which tend to be less than a third of the EA rate -- 5-6% vs. 15-20% -- even before taking into account that some of the RD acceptees are SCEA applicants). If I were they, I would be tempted to use this opportunity to bring the rates closer together. The EA rate will go down if the expected additional applications show up, and the fewer applications they defer the higher the RD acceptance rate would be. That would probably go a significant way towards damping "the frenzy" and limiting the number of SCEA applications.</p>
<p>JHS, the disparity between RD and ED admit rates has been well known for at least 4 years, ever since "The Early Admissions Game" was published, yet the disparity does not seem to have changed. </p>
<p>It seems the existing approach, slacker standards for ED, works to a schools advantage. So I for one don't see a change happening.</p>
<p>I wasn't talking about ED so much. Most of the ED schools seem reconciled to taking the heat. But Stanford and Yale are clearly a little exposed, with their closest peers having ended their early admissions programs altogether. The current situation seems a little unstable. I suspect if either Stanford or Yale had followed Harvard's lead, the other one would have been forced, effectively, to get in line, too, or face the prospect of dealing with 10-12,000 SCEA applications.</p>
<p>I disagree, by the way, that there are "slacker standards" for EA at these schools. Factoring out the role of EA in athletic recruiting and other similar activities, the kids I have seen get accepted EA at HYPS have been head-and-shoulders the best, not remotely inferior to students accepted in the RD round.</p>