I’m still not getting why applying early to MIT is a bad bet. One of my kids applied early- MIT was his first choice, far and beyond. We were full pay, not eligible for aid, and prepared to pay. On balance, MIT was a “more preferred” choice than the colleges which would have been cheaper either via merit aid or lower ticket price- and we understood that. The discipline he wanted to study wasn’t particularly strong at our state flagship, but he had a nearby state’s flagship as his safety school/less expensive option and it was a fine choice for him (and we were ok with it).
He applied to two schools- safety and MIT, got accepted to both in December, committed to MIT that day, gave up his spot at the nearby state flagship so they could give it to someone else. And done. No more applications, no more fees, score sending, etc.
I hear of kids who are applying to 17 colleges and wonder how is that a cost effective strategy? But not my kid.
But how MIT EA is a bad bet still eludes me. Especially for a kid who has a solid and affordable safety.
There is so much spurious analysis here, it makes my head spin.
Applying early to MIT is a “bad bet” only if:
(a) You attach great importance to the forgone opportunity to apply SCEA to one of HYPS, and regard your target school there as a close substitute for MIT, and
(b) You ignore the suggestion – based on anecdotal observation, but credible – that deferred EA applicants have a higher than average chance of admission RD at MIT.
A bet implies that you have something to lose. If you are a strong candidate to begin with – you aren’t running a risk of outright rejection without waiting for first semester grades from your senior year in high school – the only thing you lose by applying early to MIT is the chance to apply SCEA to one of HYPS. You can apply EA to any other college – in the past, it has been very common for people to apply EA both to MIT and Caltech, and/or MIT and Chicago and Georgetown, notwithstanding that those are all very different colleges – and you can apply ED someplace if you want. If you don’t happen to want to attend one of HYPS rather than MIT, then giving up that opportunity isn’t very important. But even if you would think about picking one of those colleges over MIT, you may very well conclude that you aren’t the sort of candidate for whom there is a meaningful advantage in applying SCEA. It’s not as if Stanford’s SCEA acceptance rate is much higher than MIT’s EA acceptance rate. And you may well conclude rationally that the possibility of enhanced admission chances overall to MIT (EA and RD combined), plus enhanced admission chances at other EA colleges, outweigh whatever improvement in your chances of admission to one of HYPS by applying SCEA there.
What @sbballer could mean that might be supportable is that applying early to MIT does not provide the same kind of boost in your chances that applying ED to Penn or Dartmouth might give you. That’s true, but almost meaningless, since (a) you can do both, and (b) you may not want to commit to going to Penn or Dartmouth if it accepts you.
There is no evidence whatsoever that applying early to MIT actually hurts your chances of admission, there or elsewhere. That would be a bad bet.
Agree with JHS. Also agree that for a lot of kids, HYP are not in the running at all if MIT is the number one choice. Depending on the discipline/interests, Cornell, RPI, Chicago, UIUC, Michigan, JHU, etc. might be “significantly more preferred” than HYP or Dartmouth or Penn. So for these kids- there’s not a lot of gaming involved. They aren’t “giving up” applying to Harvard by choosing MIT EA since they don’t plan to apply to Harvard anyway.
applying early to MIT doesn’t give you the boost that outlier schools such as Harvard and Princeton give you in in early admission. in fact applying early to MIT may decrease your chances for admission as opposed to RD considering that their EA pool is most likely stronger than RD esp for those who applied this year. (maybe part of the reason why deferred candidates have higher acceptance rates)
MIT is such a bad bet compared to schools with high SCEA EA/RD ratios that even if MIT is your first choice… to maximize your chance of getting into a selective school apply early to a school that is going to confer an EA advantage statistically… then apply to MIT RD.
MIT EA US applicants will go down next year imo as the “market” adjusts for the increase in total apps due to international apps.
this is for students who want to maximize their chance of getting into a selective school using a game theory approach.
SBB what about the students who aren’t interested in “I want to use a game theory approach” but who have done their research, have decided that they have a first choice (in this case MIT), don’t want to spend another thousand bucks on applications to less desired schools if they can get into their clear first choice school in December and be done with it?
Why is this about game theory and not about kids doing what works best for them???
My kid had zero interest in Princeton, Harvard or Yale. Why was applying early a bad bet for him? He got into his first choice in December without having to dip into his college fund to pay for an insane number of other colleges; getting into Penn early just because it was a statistically easier “win” would have been of no value since he had no interest in going to Penn whatsoever.
I think you are getting mixed up in your own analysis. For some kids applying early is the best strategy. Conserves resources (time and money) and ends up with the most desired outcome. Isn’t that the point of early???
That’s very interesting data from your deeper dive, @al2simon. I guess we can agree that the differential between SCEA and RD at Yale for a “serious” but unhooked applicant is 12.6% vs. 7.2%. I continue to believe that the average quality of the “serious” applicants is higher in the SCEA than in the RD round, and, if I’m right, the differential for unhooked candidates is narrower because the competition’s fiercer in the early round. We don’t have the data to prove or disprove my conjecture, unfortunately.
The question unhooked candidates should ask themselves, though, is whether they think they’re clearly competitive for HYPS, they really want to go to one of those schools and they can afford it, in which case they should avail themselves of the (probably) small advantage of applying SCEA. If they’re not so sure, the unadjusted ED admit rates for Penn, Brown, Dartmouth and Cornell are in the mid-20% range, and I would assume the ED pools at these schools are somewhat weaker than the SCEA pools at HYPS, so a “serious” candidate at HYPS would have significantly better ED odds at one of these schools. You can’t apply SCEA if you apply ED somewhere else, though, and the ED schools have average RD admit rates in the high single figures. So you have to decide if (i) you want the far better odds of ED at one of these schools or (ii) you prefer to take your chances with SCEA at HYPS, knowing that if you miss with that bullet, you’re looking at RD odds that are a lot steeper everywhere.
As noted upthread, I’m going to predict that the next move for all the ED schools is to create an ED II round if they don’t already have one, to scoop up kids that missed with their SCEA bullets and are panicking.
“this is for students who want to maximize their chance of getting into a selective school using a game theory approach.”
Agree that MIT EA is bad odds if the goal is to maximize chances of getting into one of the top10-15 schools. Same would go for Gtown. But that strategy is probably not the case for a lot of MIT aspirants.
MIT is a very differentiated product among the top schools. If you are a hard core STEM-er, there’s no place like MIT. So MIT really doesn’t need to deploy the ED or SCEA tools to get what they want.
Quite similar to the differentiated product offered by ND and Gtown (also no ED or SCEA). If you want a high end Catholic college, those are the top.
“As noted upthread, I’m going to predict that the next move for all the ED schools is to create an ED II round if they don’t already have one, to scoop up kids that missed with their SCEA bullets and are panicking.”
Sure. ED2 is a thing now in the 15-30 band (Wake, Emory, Tufts, Vandy). As the gaming grinds on, you could see it creep into the 5-15 band.
Or the schools could all agree to stop the madness and just use open or mildly limited EA. But we know that ain’t gonna happen.
The notion that “a selective school” is an interchangeable commodity is a sad by-product of US News and its ilk.
MIT has always had a relatively self-selecting applicant pool. The notion that a kid would be indifferent between MIT and the other “members” of some top 20 list is a little nuts.
But whatever. You game theorists can have at it. I’m clearly arguing an unpopular point of view.
But I will note- MIT’s relatively high grad rate is also a reflection of this self-selection-- a kid who wants an experience like Brown is unlikely to crave the vibe at MIT even if said kid is interested in applied math or computer science (strong disciplines at both). Kids who are gaming the system by applying early to MIT- and end up there due to not having comparably “prestigious” options-- are going to be very, very unhappy once they are deep into the GIR’s and the other required courses.
Blossom – I agree with you. MIT, Gtown and ND are niche-ey enough that they can (and do) abstain from the ED arms race just fine.
The game theory comes in when schools are overall less differentiated from each other-- say HYP, Brown, Columbia, Penn, Duke and NWU. Sure there’s differences, but also lots of similarities too.
From @northwesty: …“Or the schools could all agree to stop the madness and just use open or mildly limited EA. But we know that ain’t gonna happen.”
At one point, I think the upper tier schools may have collaborated a bit on what kind of application process they would have and it may have led to anti-trust litigation. I can’t remember the details. But I think that is why H dropped early admissions at one point and then had to stop when too few other schools followed suit. They can’t agree or coordinate their admissions procedures collaboratively. Of course, they can follow a trend, and most do! But they have to avoid the appearance of colluding together for legal reasons.
Sam – if they all agreed, there would be some amount of collaboration that would be permissible legally. Probably through an industry group. There’s many examples of that. And you certainly could have a few schools stake out a leadership position and try to get others to follow.
Like suppose HYPS went to EA without single choice. But (as Gtown and ND do) you prohibit your applicants from applying binding ED anywhere. That could erode the current leverage of the ED tool.
But the bigger issue is that I don’t think many of these schools would agree.
If you want more anecdotes my son applied EA to MIT, was deferred and ultimately rejected. He applied regular to Harvard and even told his interviewer he hadn’t applied SCEA because it wasn’t his first choice. He got into Harvard. (He had the advantage of being a legacy and being an obvious CS major in the year they announced they were starting an engineering school - so I believe they were looking for strong engineering type kids that year more than usual). It was also the last year that the woman who got fired for faking her credentials was in charge of admissions. She was well known for looking for kids who brought something else to the table besides academics. (Which is fine btw.) But it is a bit of a warning that sometimes actually being different from the usual candidate may be better than being the same. I wish MIT still published the admissions statistics the way they did back then. They gave a lot the information that this thread speculates about.
In any event I think there are a lot of kids like my son who prefer MIT to Harvard and are not interested in using a game theory approach to applications. My kid ended up choosing Carnegie Mellon and was happy as could be there. In fact in retrospect I suspect CMU should have been his first choice all along.
If HYPS went to Georgetown-style REA, it wouldn’t erode the current leverage of the ED tool one grain, because everyone who applies to HYPS early now already can’t apply ED anywhere. What it would do is probably roughly triple the number of early applications each of HYPS and MIT receive, and probably give a bump to Georgetown, Chicago, Caltech, and a few others. In the process, it would pretty much eliminate the signalling value of any EA application. An EA application to one of HYPS would no longer signal that the recipient was the applicant’s first choice, and an EA application to Georgetown or MIT would no longer signal that the applicant had not applied early to HYPS. So it would force everyone to process a lot more early applications, with less predictability about yield. Hard to see how that makes the world better.
Disagree. EA apps into HYPS would still signal quite strongly – you are one of my top 2 or 3 schools and I decided bypass binding ED in order to apply here. And with the ability to apply to a larger group of high end schools EA, the appeal of sending just one binding ED app to Penn or Duke or NW would presumably decline by comparison.
And it is a very simple process for schools to manage yields no matter what the system. They do just fine managing the crazy RD/Powerball stage that currently exists.
My pet theory is that the system would de-escalate if EA replaced ED/SCEA. Particularly on the RD/Powerball back end. But you’d have to run the experiment to really find out.
My kid got deferred at H. One more data point to support the view here that the advantage of applying SCEA to H is minimal at the most for the Good but not Extraordinary unhooked kids. Knowing what we know now, he probably should have applied EA or ED to a lower ranked school at the early round and shoot a dart at H at the RD round. He has a brother coming through the pipeline, so what we learned so far can be put in good use in the future. Totally enjoyed reading the original thoughts from all the heavy hitters. Thank you!
What would make the whole process better would be to abolish Binding Early Decision and have schools choose either Restricted/Single-Choice Early Action or Unrestricted Early Action.
“What would make the whole process better would be to abolish Binding Early Decision and have schools choose either Restricted/Single-Choice Early Action or Unrestricted Early Action.”
That’s what I obviously think. One tweek that might help a new EA system is to somehow limit the number EA apps a kid can send to the top group of schools. Maybe 4?
That way, the EA apps would still convey some meaningful information about top choices (but not the one top choice). That’s a good thing. And kids couldn’t trophy hunt by applying EA to all 8 Ivies.