SCEA? Huh?

You can call me stupid or whatever, but what is SCEA? Do you have to commit to a program in the college that you are intending to go?

<p>Single Choice Early Action. Basically you apply early and get your decision early and it's not binding. So you have until May 1st to approve or deny admission. </p>

<p>Many EA programs allow you to also apply to other EA programs at different schools, allowing you to recieve multiple results in December. If a program is SCEA (Yale I believe?) then you can only apply early to one school. And you cannot apply ED either.</p>

<p>Single Choice Early Action - You don't have commit. You apply early to the SCEA school, but you can wait and see your RD results before deciding. However, you can apply EA ONLY to that school - "single choice".</p>

<p>Harvard, Yale, and Stanford are all SCEA.</p>

<p>So if i apply under SCEA to Stanford, then i can apply to Yale, etc... under the same SCEA?</p>

<p>If you apply to Stanford SCEA, you can't apply to any other school early. You can apply to as many as you want for regulard ecision (RD), though. That's the whole single-choice part of Single-Choice Early Action.</p>

<p>Thank you all very much</p>

<p>The best way to think of SCEA is as it being non-binding ED. ED has a lot of problems. Colleges often fill up 30-50% of their freshman classes with ED applicants even though the ED applicant pool is statistically "weaker" than the RD pool. Applicants have felt forced to use ED as an application strategy rather than its original purpose. Educators feel that it puts too pressure on high school students to pick a college early. Some minority groups feel that it discriminates against URM's since URM's are more likely to apply for financial aid. As a result of this, Stanford and Yale switched from ED to SCEA in 2003, and Harvard followed shortly thereafter. The advantage of ED to the colleges is that it makes it easier to do yield projections. All of the colleges that switched to SCEA had unbelieveable yields anyway.</p>