<p>I have heard all over CC that early action programs provide no added admissions benefit to the applicant other than finding out in December (which is, in fact, a great benefit). I have also read that SCEA makes most sense for kids who are in the high percentiles of scores/GPA for the school and who have a decent list of EC's, etc.</p>
<p>So, for an applicant who has strong, competitive "stats" and no major weakness as far as EC's, essays, recs, does SCEA give the applicant a better chance of being admitted?</p>
<p>Applying SCEA does not increase one’s chances of admission. A person admitted SCEA would have been admitted RD and vice versa. Yes, the acceptance rate is higher for SCEA applicants (typically 15% vs. 5%, but this varies by school), but that is completely due to the strength of the early pool. Students applying early tend to be extraordinarily strong as well as extremely competitive, and they also tend to have one or more hooks (legacy, URM, recruited athlete, etc.). These factors account for the higher early acceptance rate. </p>
<p>Apply SCEA if you meet these criteria:
Your GPA and standardized testing profile are extremely strong as of the end of your junior year.
The school to which you are applying SCEA has been your first choice for quite some time.
You can prepare a competitive and compelling application by the November 1 deadline.</p>
<p>With the right stats and awesome essays, applying SCEA might be somewhat of a boost in relative terms to the RD round. There are only so many athletes and legacies that can be exhausted in the SCEA round. As for URMs, their numbers are pretty low in the SCEA round due to socioeconomic reasons compared to the RD round. After all three of such hooked candidates have been factored, pure algebra shows that your chances of getting into Princeton are a lot higher in SCEA than in RD. While less applicants are accepted in SCEA, far, far less people are applying SCEA than RD.</p>
<p>If you can’t get in your application by the SCEA round, consider the priority deadline. This past year the priority deadline was December 15. This date is fresh after Princeton accepts/defers/rejects SCEA applicants so admissions officers will be able to read your application as one of the first applications in the RD round with a keen and fresh mindset. This is especially true if you hail from an over-represented state with a large magnitude of applicants (New Jersey, California, New York). It’s human nature to tend towards things at the beginning, like how one more easily remembers things at the start of a list rather than at the middle or end. </p>
<p>If I could turn back in time and do everything all over again, I would have submitted my application RD in the month of October or November. But this is only because I think that I could have personally submitted the same quality application as I did in December (the day the application was due). Maybe I wouldn’t have been waitlisted. Maybe.</p>
<p>While more URMs will definitely end up applying in the RD round, the most well qualified ones will typically end up applying early to many schools through the Questbridge program. And though there seem to be more spots open for unhooked applicants in the SCEA round, the group of students competing for those spots is substantially better. The net result is that there is no statistical advantage to applying early. </p>
<p>I definitely agree that you should get your app in as early as possibly (SCEA=Oct. 15, RD=Dec. 15). I went to an Exploring College Options Session at which a Harvard officer said that he was much more interested in the first 700 applications he read than in the last 700 he read.</p>
<p>Questbridge is for low income applicants. While many are URMs, I think “the most well qualified ones will typically end up applying early to many schools through the Questbridge program” is probably untrue. Many URM college applicants wouldn’t qualify for QBridge due to income level</p>
<p>@aleiactaest & T26E4 yeah most Questbridge applicants are Asian (and thus ORM) according to the pie chart that breaks down applicants by ethnicity on the Questbridge website</p>
<p>If you can get your application ready in time I don’t see why you wouldn’t apply SCEA if Princeton is your first choice. You find out faster. That seems like a pretty big advantage to me.</p>