hi guys. i’m currently a senior and will be applying to colleges this fall for the class of 2020. I’m confused whether you can apply ED and EA at the same time. I know that for the SCEA the applicant is prohibited to apply EA or ED to other colleges. is that the same with EA? for instance, can i EA to boston university while applying ED to some other college?
Generally you can apply EA to one school and ED. This does depend on the colleges though. Yale is the only school with restrictive EA that I know of, and there are a few schools who, if you apply ED, won’t let you apply EA anywhere. For your sake, you can apply EA at boston and apply ED at another school, if they allow it.
Well, BU does not have Early Action, so that question’s moot.
That’s not quite accurate. Generally, if you apply SCEA, you cannot apply anywhere else ED, but you can still apply EA to any state school, as well as any school outside the US.
Each college will have it’s own intricacies about what other schools you can and cannot apply for early, so it’s best to check the websites.
In many cases, schools with EA do not ask you to limit your other EA or ED applications. However, some schools do, so check each EA school carefully in terms of what restrictions it has. Examples:
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and Tulane have SCEA or REA where you are not supposed to apply to many other EA schools (though each has exceptions which are not all the same – read carefully) or apply ED anywhere.
EA applicants to Georgetown can apply EA to other schools, but not ED.
Many other schools allow EA applicants to apply EA or ED to other schools without restriction (other than whatever the other schools may have). If all of the schools you want to apply EA are completely non-restrictive in this sense, then you can apply to all of them EA.
Note that Tulane offers both EA and SCEA, where SCEA expresses a higher level of interest in exchange for not applying EA or ED to most other possible schools.
Boston University has ED, not EA. ED schools tend not to care where you may apply EA, since ED is supposed to indicate that the school is your first choice and that you will attend if admitted and the cost is acceptable.