<p>Just posted elsewhere so I thought I would share......</p>
<p>Some</a> Early Returns on Early Admission - NYTimes.com</p>
<p>Well…that just depresses me.</p>
<p>^^tell me about it; and my daughter didn’t even apply to any of these schools</p>
<p>Wow, Fordham is rocking the early apps. :(</p>
<p>More early news: Villanova reported that they received over 7,000 EA apps this year, which is significantly higher than previous years.</p>
<p>Glad we’re done with that!</p>
<p>Yet we know the number of seniors in the Class of 2011 is slightly less than the Class of 2010 - so what does this mean? Are students applying to even more colleges this year?</p>
<p>I can understand why EA number is increasing. What puzzles me is, in the tough economic condition, why is the ED number skyrocketing. It’s a general consensus that if you need to compare the FA packages, we can’t risk ED. Anybody with good explanation?</p>
<p>The only explanation I have is panic. Families are so concerned about getting into what they consider to be a good school that they are throwing common sense about being able to compare packages out the window and applying ED to boost their odds. I think there is a lot of fear out there.</p>
<p>Perhaps the students with families who can pay full cost are being more decisive with thier applications?</p>
<p>Families who are full pay are in the driver’s seat - I can’t see why they would feel more pressure to apply ED.</p>
<p>Families who are full pay are not “in the driver’s seat” for highly selective schools; there are just too many kids, of all kinds, for anyone to be cocksure about application. I think the uptick in ED applications has more to do with the popular wisdom that ED is a better shot at getting in, to a school that is otherwise very difficult to get into. In fact, I think the ED boost is more perceived than true, for those who are not recruited athletes; the statistics for ED acceptance are very seldom parsed for athletic recruitment, but in some “highly selective” colleges as much as 30% of the incoming freshman class are recruited athletes, and those are generally tagged in the ED round.</p>
<p>Most of my S’s class applied ED. It is a private school so most can afford full freight. They feel it is a necessity to have a good chance to get into a “good school”.</p>
<p>The “skyrocketing” ED number consists of a few thousand people, total. The biggest percentage increase, at Northwestern, represents 410 applications. There are probably fewer than 15 colleges that get as many as 1,000 ED applications per year. Last year, the five Ivy ED colleges, plus Duke, Johns Hopkins, and Northwestern got a cumulative total of about 21,000 ED applications. The top 25 LACs probably didn’t get that many total. I doubt that all the ED applications in the world amount more than 70,000 or so.</p>
<p>That’s against a base of about 3.3 million U.S. high school graduates, of whom at least 1.7 million or so are going to college. (And some of the ED applications will be non-U.S. students.) In other words, a lot fewer than 5% of college applicants are applying anywhere ED, and the “skyrocketing” increase in ED applications represents a rounding error in the population of college applicants. Of that group, some may be making a mistake by applying ED, but most are probably people who (a) know they will not be eligible for financial aid anywhere and have the resources to pay for college, (b) know that they will have a $0 EFC anywhere, so they will not be bound to attend a college that does not offer full aid, or (c) understand the financial aid policies of the college to which they are applying, and can live with the result if they are admitted. Again, it’s not so many people that they couldn’t fit into those categories.</p>
<p>Finally, the vaunted decrease in U.S. high school graduates amounts to about 25,000 people on a base of 3.3 million – less than 1%. Of whom only 50-60% would have applied to any college anyway. That gets completely swamped by continuation of the historic trend towards more high school graduates going to college (especially in an economy where getting a good job is tough), and the trend of foreign students, especially newly affluent Asian students, coming to college in the U.S.</p>
<p>Well, jhs that puts into perspective, but it’s the 21K students who are all trying for the same top schools, so if my S were among those I would think that this year would be even more difficult.</p>
<p>JHS,</p>
<p>you are right. I forgot that we are living in a College Confidential bubble. Though my S2 is not in the run for the top 20 colleges, I forget we are still operating in top 50’ish college scene: even though the ED numbers all seem to go through the roof in this group, this is very tiny % of the total college bound seniors… the problem is, this is the group my S2 has to compete against. Sigh…</p>
<p>Time to put things in perspective… I am dying for this application season to be over - of course, with a good outcome, but who knows - nothing is for sure.</p>
<p>^^^ JHS,
I’m not sure the impact of this increase in ED applicants is as trivial as you make it out to be, especially at schools that typically fill a large fraction of their entering class from the ED pool. Take Penn, for example, which usually gets roughly half its entering class from the ED pool. What do we make of the 18.33% increase in its ED pool? Well, it’s an increase or 700+ in the ED applicant pool. Last year Penn accepted 31.2% of ED applicants; and by the rules of ED, they’re going to get virtually a 100% yield on ED admits. If they continue to accept ED applicants at the same rate, that’s 218 more places filled from ED and 218 fewer places to be filled from the RD pool. But since only half the class was filled from the RD pool last year, that amounts to a 17.6% reduction in the number of places available for RD applicants, enough to shift the entering class to 59% ED admits and 41% RD admits. That would have a HUGE impact on RD applicants.</p>
<p>Of course, we don’t KNOW they’ll continue to admit from the ED pool at the same rate. The larger ED applicant pool might just make it harder for “un-hooked” (non-legacy, non-recruited athlete, non-URM) ED applicants to gain admission. But then again, it might depend on who the applicants are. If the 700+ additional ED applicants have credentials comparable to the RD pool, then there’s really no reason for Penn NOT to fill an even larger percentage of its entering class from the ED pool; it only means a lower overall admit rate (due to a higher yield) and greater “selectivity,” things that reflect favorably upon the school, inter alia in the US News rankings. And if some significant fraction of the 700+ additional ED applicants are legacies, there will be pressure to admit them at a high rate. According to the Penn alumni association, legacy ED applicants get admitted to Penn at a 38-42% rate, v. 28-34% for non-legacy ED applicants, and 12-15% for both legacy and non-legacy RD applicants; so the alumni association is encouraging legacies to apply ED, which may account for some of the increase. </p>
<p>In any event, I wouldn’t so blithely dismiss the impact of an increase in ED applicants of this magnitude. We’ll have to wait and see how the numbers shake out, but the effects could be significant.</p>
<p>Doesn’t it seem like if you are trying to gain an advantage by submitting for non-binding early applications that any advantage is washed out in a flood of 6 to 10 thousand applicants? Surely there is a point of diminishing returns somewhere in there.</p>
<p>Or it signals a shift toward application weariness where kids are just not willing to send out 7, 10 ,15 applications and are happy to “pick one” and apply. What used to be a “senior year” activity now spans two years and some schools even start talking to 15 year olds about “college.” I think kids would just as soon eliminate the cattle call feelings that college application time has become and colleges need to cut bait and accept or reject kids intead of this defer or waitlist thousands. It will return much sanity to the situation.</p>
<p>Many of Ds friends with extremely high stats applied ED out of pure panic. Even though the ED college was not their first choice college, they didn’t want to risk losing out on the ED boost. For Ds friends, the most popular choices for ED were: Columbia, Northwestern, and Upenn.</p>