So Brown has a notably higher acceptance rate for ED, but I’m also aware of the huge debate regarding whether or not that’s actually reflective of more people getting in or whether it’s reflective of a much more qualified applicant pool/athletes and legacies/etc. Brown is one of the schools I really like/even love, however, just as who I am I would really prefer to have the ability in choosing my school, because I haven’t had the chance to hardcore visit and tour a lot of the schools I’m applying to and also I’m indecisive in much of what I do and would really like to be able to go to freshman admit weekends to get a better feel for everything. In the end though, Brown seems like such an awesome school and if they were REA I would 100% REA there, but I’m hesitating to ED because on one hand, I don’t want to not ED and therefore lose my shot at getting into Brown, but on the other hand, I don’t want to ED and then realize that I’ve changed my mind about which college I want to go to come December 15th. So if I have a similar shot in RD to Brown as my shot in ED, then I think I would be more comfortable going the RD route, but if my chances are drastically different then I’m more inclined to ED.
If anyone thinks my stats would be helpful in this discussion, I’m willing to post them.
I don’t think you should apply ED because you’re not absolutely sure that you want Brown. DS was accepted ED last year, and both he and I consider it the best possible school for him. But it might not be the best school for you.
DS and I did some calculations last year, using published data, and we estimated the admissions rate for unhooked ED applicants at 12% maximum. I don’t believe that the admissions standards are different, although they do take a substantial fraction of the freshman class ED.
If you knew for sure that Brown’s decision would be the same whether you applied ED or RD, what would you do?
Because that’s what Brown says. You can decide to not believe it – or tell yourself that whatever happened in March would have happened in December.
And NYMomof2 – when you figured that out, what was your definition of unhooked? Because there are “hooks” that are not publicized – you don’t know how many ED acceptances went to first-gen students, development students, legacies, faculty and staff kids.
The details are foggy. I know that we subtracted athletes, and I believe we estimated the number of legacies based on proportion of class that was legacies and assuming most legacies were admitted ED. We didn’t know how many athletes were also legacies, and we had no information on first-gen, etc.