The Plague of ‘Early Decision’

Parent Cafe
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@spayurpets Previous posts have talked about the limited usefulness of these overall acceptance rates of ED when comparing to RD acceptance rates. Because most recruited athletes and legacies are accepted via ED, an unhooked applicant needs to adjust the ED acceptance rate to purge it of those favored groups if he wants to approximate the ED advantage. (At some schools, this can be tough because not all schools publish those details.)

Adjusting the ED acceptance rates in this way does, indeed, still reveal an ED advantage (at least at Brown, the one school to which my daughter applied), but the advantage is nowhere as big as it first appears with the raw numbers. FYI, for the class entering Brown in the fall of 2017, the ED accepted students are expected to comprise approximately 42% of the entering class.

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Re: #340

You also need to consider the strength of applicant pools (even after removing the special applicants like recruited athletes). It is entirely possible that one of the ED and RD applicant pools is contains a greater percentage of applicants who would be admitted than the other even if the same criteria and standards were applied to both pools.

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Yes, but that’s a very complicated analysis when you are looking, as we are, at the tippy-top of the food chain. A few weeks ago, HYPS deferred or rejected something around 20,000 kids who had applied SCEA, and I would guess that at least 15,000 of them are strong candidates who – and whose parents, teachers, counselors – legitimately felt they had a shot at whichever of those schools they applied to. Most of those 15,000+ very strong applicants – and indeed, a good number of the 3,000 or so kids HYPS actually accepted EA – are now likely RD applicants at 2, 3, 10, 12 other highly selective colleges.

Brown, Columbia, Duke, Northwestern each get somewhat more than 3,000 ED applications. How many applications do you think each of them gets from the 15,000+ disappointed (or successful) SCEAers? Do you think that group looks less qualified than the college’s ED pool? I doubt that. MIT, Georgetown, and, historically, Chicago get a lot more EA applications – some of which are duplicates, of course – but how many of the SCEA cohort do you think are in their RD admissions pools? My guess: lots and lots. And how about the top LACs? A good friend of my kids applied to Yale SCEA and was deferred, then later accepted RD. In the meantime, she applied to 9 other colleges, all of them top LACs, and was accepted at all of them. (She was an absolutely terrific applicant, with lots of special stuff to her credit.) I don’t think many of those LACs saw dozens of candidates that strong in their ED pools.

It may not be the case that the RD pools at all of these colleges are stronger on an average or percentage basis than the ED pool. I am willing to believe the colleges when they say their early pools are stronger. But while the RD pools for all of these colleges have a certain number of hopeless applications in them (and some in the EA/ED pools, too), there’s plenty of reason to believe that the top of the pool – the group from which most successful applicants will be selected – is as strong or stronger at the RD level because of the backwash from SCEA.

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@JHS Not many kids want to do trophy hunting, it hurts friends. Unfortunately sometime need for financial aid and not knowing where one will get in or not, kids apply to many schools. But I have seen many kids who got into SCEA School have dropped their application from majority of other schools leaving one or two more school just to compare need based aids.

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As far as the 40-50% plus ED schools, it seems that there is even MORE of an advantage when one considers that most tippy top kids go for HYPSM etc. and are not in the ED applicant pool at say Duke, Vanderbilt and Northwestern.
Later, since the vast majority will be deferred or denied, they WILL be.

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When my eldest applied to colleges 10 years ago and there wasn’t nearly as much college admissions information on the internet, kids like mine believed what their public school counselors told them: don’t ever apply ED if you need FA because you’ll want to compare offers, and only apply ED if you are 100% positive you want to attend that school. (How many kids were 100% positive? I don’t know, but what I do know is that a lot of S’s high-achieving cohort applied to Yale SCEA precisely because it wasn’t binding and they weren’t totally sure.) Applying ED was not as much a matter of admissions strategy; I don’t think as many students then had an awareness of any significant advantage beyond this vague idea of showing the school a bit more love. Certainly, we never heard talk of a difference in the selectivity of the applicant pools, for example, like we do now. My second kid was a recruited athlete, and when she applied we also never heard a single coach reference using ED to get in his top recruits. While I’m not saying things have changed in reality in the collegiate sports world, there didn’t use to be as much openness. Now, with my third, we have actually sat in on athletics sessions in which the coach was very clear about the fact that his “help” was only good in the ED round.

Given the more intense competition for the elites, I get the impression that a lot more kids today are going the ED route–not because they’re so sold on a particular college, but because they think that’s the smart way to play the game. So IMO, despite assertions to the contrary, colleges are using ED to manipulate yield and slip in lower-stats kids they need–not because they want more the kids that want them more.

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What happens if Brown, Columbia, etc., the schools next to HYPS fill up their classes with more EDers, say 85%? I guess many of “the 15000+ disappointed (or successful) SCEAers” would apply ED to non-HYPS in fear of not getting in anywhere top 20 in the RD round. The non-HYPS schools could see their stronger applicants in the RD round. That sounds good for the schools, including HYPS, but bad for the 15K+ applicants.

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I would guess that if the tier below HYPS starts to admit an overwhelmingly large percentage of their classes in the ED round, to the point that HYPS actually feel like they’re losing significant numbers of good students who are afraid of being shut out, then they’ll respond in the way you’d expect: by increasing the proportion of their classes that they admit SCEA, going to ED themselves or looking closely at what’s happening in Chicago.

This year, UChicago (whose dean of admissions, Jim Nondorf, is one of the smartest and savviest out there, imo) seems to have moved to an all-of-the-above model, with EA, ED1, ED2 and RD. It would be very interesting to know how many applied in each round, the caliber of the applicants, where else they’d applied and how many were admitted/deferred/denied. I’m not optimistic that they’ll release that data, unfortunately. This model could be the future, though, because it looks like it gives applicants a lot of options while enabling the university to lock up a large proportion of the class early and without seeming to do so (if they never disclose, for example, how many were admitted under each of the options).

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@TheGFG : When my kids applied to colleges 10 years ago, essentially all of their academically ambitious friends, both at the public school they attended and at the private school they used to attend, applied somewhere ED or EA. Their counselors recommended it, and at the private school practically required it. There was a ton of consciousness about admission strategy then, at least in my world. I agree it has been disseminated more since then – after the Harvard-Princeton bid to end early admissions collapsed, colleges seem to have doubled down on early admissions and decided that was OK as long as they promoted the opportunity more.

@lakemath1234 : In my kids’ cohort, about half of the students who were accepted SCEA somewhere kept at least one other application alive, and in some cases actually decided to enroll at a college other than the one that accepted them SCEA. A few of them were trophy hunting, sure – that does happen – but most weren’t. Some were looking for the best financial aid package, and others were legitimately undecided about which place was best for them. People I know in real life chose Harvard over Yale SCEA and Northwestern over Harvard SCEA, or spent a long time deciding between their SCEA school and one or two other possibilities. I remember one young woman on CC who was accepted at Harvard SCEA and then agonized for much of April whether she should go there, take a full merit ride at Brandeis, or go to Brown where she liked more of the people. And there have been several kids on CC accepted SCEA to one of HYPS who have ultimately been coaxed to UNC or Michigan by full-ride scholarships with other bennies attached.

Everyone: I was thinking about this last night, and I realized that I only know one kid in the past decade+ who was accepted at one of the HYPS schools or another highly selective college who did not apply early somewhere. I’m sure such kids exist, but not in the portion of the world I can see. Most of them, in fact, were accepted SCEA or ED, or deferred and later accepted at the school to which they applied SCEA or ED (and often others). Some were rejected or waitlisted by their SCEA/ED school but accepted at similar institutions RD. Some didn’t like the SCEA or ED proposition, and did one or more EA applications to Chicago, MIT, and/or Georgetown, and attended one of them or were later accepted RD elsewhere.

The point(s) of that observation: (1) The SCEA pools are really strong, and SCEA/deferred ED applicants applying elsewhere RD probably has a huge impact on RD pools. Which I was already arguing. (2) Strong applicants figure out it makes sense to have an early application strategy, no matter what their financial circumstances. What strategy it is has to reflect those circumstances, but they had one.

The pool of early applicants to Ivy League colleges, Stanford, MIT, and a few others (say, Duke, Northwestern, Chicago, Georgetown) is probably about 30-35,000 unique applicants. Which is about the total number of first-year students the same colleges enroll, collectively. It would be really interesting to know the degree of overlap between those two pools.

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Lots of interesting points about how the market currently works and how the market could work differently in the future.

Chicago’s full menu experiment will be interesting to watch. Unless there’s a meaningful boost provided for ED 1 and 2 at Chicago, you’d think applicants would gravitate towards non-binding EA. I’m guessing their gambit is to poach EA applications from above (with kids who choose to avoid the SC restriction in SCEA at HYPS). That might put some pressure on HYPS to drop the SC (which I think is kind of bogus). And also poach some apps from below (with kids who choose to avoid the binding commitment at Columbia, Penn, Duke, NW, etc.).

I also find the Catholic layer of the market quite interesting. #15 ND, #20 Gtown and #31 BC all just roll with EA. But Holy Cross (as an LAC) is a big ED school (45% of seats filled ED).

Gtown in particular seems to get great results marching to their own tune. They minimize apps by not using the Common App and by requiring interviews. They live with a higher admit rate (no ED and no boost for early applicants) but get great yield – 50% (a tiny bit higher than Duke’s). Seems like their method hones in on kids who really really want Georgetown without asking for an ED commitment on the front end. ND also gets great yield (53%) without ED. I’d guess it is because if you are interested in a Catholic college, Gtown and ND are the HYP (who don’t need ED either) of that market niche.

BC (27% yield) looks like the Catholic safety to Gtown and ND. If they wanted to, they could probably improve their numbers by using ED in the same way that Penn did when it was the Ivy League safety school.

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Georgetown EA does have a restriction – the EA applicant is not supposed to apply ED anywhere (but is not restricted from applying EA anywhere else).

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Yes. GT, ND and BC are all the same – REA, where the restriction is no ED. But other EA apps are allowed. So the Catholic school REA is less restrictive than HYPS-type SCEA is.

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@JHS This is the exact thing we have observed this year as parents of a senior.

@northwesty BC has trouble getting upper middle class students that are Full Pay because its not so prestigious that families are willing to shell out $250K (where they can pay the same amount to go to a higher ranked school). Their lack of some sort of merit hurts them. Holy Cross is a small (3k) D1 schools so their # of recruited/scholarship athletes suck up a large proportion of their ED pool.

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I would add to @northwesty’s comment that the UChicago ED2 timetable (app due Jan 1, decision mid-Feb) seems perfectly set to pick off kids who got deferred or denied SCEA at HYPS, are freaking out and want to maximize their chances of getting into a school of UChicago’s caliber.

Regarding Georgetown, apart from the Catholic dimension, I think most would view them as clearly the top school in DC, with lots of government expertise/relationships. That surely makes them attractive to certain segments of the applicant pool.

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Suzy – BC does just fine, obviously. But I’d agree that at #31, they are right at the edge in the tiers where ED fades out and merit comes in.

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“the UChicago ED2 timetable (app due Jan 1, decision mid-Feb) seems perfectly set to pick off kids who got deferred or denied SCEA at HYPS”

And also for ED1 defer/denies.

If you are really gaming it out, ED2 (Chicago, Vandy, Emory, Tufts) gives you a potential second silver bullet to shoot. One of my kid’s friends specifically planned on going ED1 to Brown and then ED2 to Vandy as a second bite at the apple.

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Exactly. They are one of the lowest of the high ranked schools that meets full need (as per CSS). Others down the food chain tend to be merit-based. As a result, 'Nova picks up quite a few upper middle class kids from BC cross admits.

fwiw: Years ago, Emory published is EDII numbers, and surprisingly, the boost over RD was minimal.

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Aaannd there it is: https://dailynorthwestern.com/2017/01/05/campus/northwestern-acceptance-rate-projected-to-fall-below-10-percent/

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Per the invaluable @spayurpets, Northwestern’s expected class size last year was 1,925. Let’s assume that’s correct, and hasn’t changed year over year. If, as this article states, Northwestern admitted “about 26 percent” of “more than 3,700” ED applications, and those ED admits have a 95% yield, then Northwestern will fill 47% of the class (914/1,925) in the ED round.

I don’t have the data to prove it, but I think that the above numbers don’t include the Questbridge kids, and that therefore the number admitted ED is even higher. I say this because otherwise it doesn’t look to me like the math supports the statement that the overall admit rate will be under 10%.

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The NWU numbers from the WaPo article (not sure if they are from the last cycle or the cycle before) was 38% ED admit rate, 13% overall admit rate, 50% of the class filled from ED.

But the change in the number in ED apps I think is most telling. 2,667 ED applications compared to 3,700+ for this cycle. To me, that says “strategic behavior” way more than “I just love love love the Wildcats.”

Unfortunately, the more kids that get wise to the ED game, the less helpful that game is. But it is still better odds than RD. This train keeps on rolling.