<p>If a school has the EA option, why wouldn't someone apply early and get it out the way and get their decision back earlier?</p>
<p>they plan to divert their time to other applications at that point.</p>
<p>They decided to procrastinate and apply to the night that RD was due. That’s what I did for my top school. I got wait listed, but ultimately was accepted. I did not enroll because of lack of financial aid even though they had a supposed “no-loan” type policy…oh well.</p>
<p>Most colleges have less competitive EA applicant pools, however this is not always the case and some applicants may choose to wait until the RD pool if it means that their chances of acceptance will increase even if they have to sacrifice recieving their decision earlier.</p>
<p>Um, because you might rejected EA. At that point, you can’t apply RD at all…</p>
<p>If you get rejected in the EA round and not deferred, isn’t likely that you would have been rejected in RD round?</p>
<p>I am not sure any of these reasons are valid. If you are rejected EA, you are most likely will be rejected RD. If you are in the range, then you at least will be deferred to RD pool after you are not accepted in the EA pool. The only really good reason I have heard so far is that if you want to have your senior mid year grades to be taken into consideration, you may want to wait to do RD. So if you have mediocre grade early freshmen year and you think you will do really well senior year, then that might help you. But then again, you can submit your senior mid year grades if you are deferred. In general, I think EA is a good thing to do. It forces you get the essays and most of the application process done early, you don’t have to cram at the end of RD deadline.</p>
<p>I agree with ttparent. Not only midyear grades, but you may also participate in some other ECs or whatnot throughout the first semester of your senior year that might improve your chances. Overall, though, I think that taking the EA opportunity when possible would be the best option (for reasons already stated above).</p>
<p>That being said, some schools have restrictive, but non-binding EAs (Stanford and Yale, for example) that don’t allow you to EA to other schools. In that case, you may not want to EA since it will prevent you from doing so to other universities.</p>
<p>EA (early action) to me means non binding early action. SCEA (single choice early action) is the one that let you apply early action to just that one school. SCEA is ok if it is for your #1 school or if there is no other schools on your list offering EA.</p>