^That “twist” (#498) occupied several pages of discussions in this thread over the past few weeks.
The “ED3” gambit does seem like something new. But it also seems like something old, that everyone seems to take for granted as OK.
Call it “Late Decision”: It is extremely common, at all reasonably selective colleges, for admissions officers to call a kid who has been waitlisted – or to call the kid’s counselor, or both of them – and ask whether the kid will enroll if accepted off the waitlist. Often, if the kid says “yes,” he’s told that he has been accepted in the same call, and he rarely has to wait more than a day or two for the answer. (Which in most cases, but not all, is an acceptance.) If a kid says “no,” he won’t be accepted, and “I don’t know” apparently sounds a lot like its homophone. I have heard about Harvard taking a kid off the waitlist without asking that question (but sometimes it has asked). I am not certain about anywhere else.
There’s some justification for the practice, because with waitlist acceptances the college may be trying to plug a specific hole for which there are a limited number of appropriate people on the waitlist, and if Candidate A isn’t going to come then the college doesn’t want to have to wait two or three weeks before making an offer to Candidate B. However, sometimes people have suspected certain colleges of artificially restricting the number of RD acceptances they issue, then taking as many as 100-200 people off the waitlist after calls like those described, precisely to keep their yield numbers high and acceptance rates low.
Those are obviously extremely hard to get. But for the kids who get them, a likely letter is basically a way for a school to convert its RD timeline into de facto EA.
Competition and innovation are generally good things, but at some point it starts to become silly.
Yes they do likely letters. One wave for athletes in the Fall, and another usually in February for mainly academic candidates. For athletes, there effectively is already an “ED0” system, where the musical chairs game gets played in the spring, summer and early fall, long before any ED decisions are released.
I don’t know, @JHS - I’m OK with “Late Decision” for waitlisted candidates, because it takes place after the whole process has played out, all the schools have rendered decisions, the applicant has likely been admitted elsewhere and therefore has options. If the applicant doesn’t have any admits, all “Late Decision” does is force her to give up on getting off any other waitlists she may be on in exchange for an actual offer from somewhere, which isn’t the greatest of sacrifices, imo.
“ED3” is more troubling to me because it enables schools to target individual students and try to make them reveal additional information about their preferences, with an implicit threat that they’ll be sunk in the RD round if they don’t convert to an ED app. If a student had previously submitted an SCEA app or another ED app somewhere, it isn’t clear to me that she could ethically agree to convert the RD app to an ED3 one without withdrawing the SCEA/ED app, so she’d either have to admit that she’d submitted the SCEA/ED app (which she had no expectation the ED3 school would ever know), or have to tell the ED3 school that no, she doesn’t want to convert to an ED3 app, which is a rebuke to the ED3 school and seems like it would probably hurt or doom her application .
I particularly don’t like that individual students get singled out in this way; everyone else who has previously submitted an RD app to the ED3 school hasn’t sent any sort of signal to the ED3 school by doing so, and knows that all their other apps aren’t visible. Reaching out to a few applicants like @RustyTrowel’s kid and putting them on the spot like this doesn’t seem fair.
Maybe so, #503-504, but I don’t think it will reveal or contradict SCEA or ED interest if the request to convert a RD application to binding, if that request comes in mid- January. The applicant would be free to do either since presumably applicant was denied or deferred by his/her ED application (otherwise there is no choice anyway). The SCEA application may have likewise been deferred or denied freeing up applicant to accept so-called ED3 offer. Only IF applicant had been accepted SCEA, then the applicant may be “forced” to reveal this to the other institution. However I am not clear that this really is too much of a tactical disadvantage to student when student can claim to still be interested in the other school and perhaps hoping for a competitive FA package.
@Sam-I-Am - you’re right. I hadn’t focused on the fact that the “ED3” letter came in January. Thinking about it again with that in mind, I’m not so bothered by it. So long as the letter comes after the SCEA/ED1 reply dates, the applicant’s really just being offered another bite at the ED apple, where it’s pretty clear they’ll take her, so she doesn’t really lose anything.
That said, it wouldn’t be shocking in the not-too-distant-future to read on a CC board that Junior, who has an SCEA app out to [pick your favorite SCEA school] and thinks he’s competitive, got an e-mail/phone message from [pick your favorite aggressive-with-ED school] on December 1 noting that they’d read his application with great interest and are offering him a one-time, 24-hour opportunity to change it to ED.
Sure she does. If she accepts, she loses finding out if she gets into other schools and any need based/merit based awards. She also loses the ability to compare awards. If she does not accept, the ED3 school could move on to the next kid on the wait list and drop her.
The worst thing I have heard in college admissions was Baylor offering to pay admitted students to retake the SAT after they had been accepted. This RD3 thing is worse than that.
Sure, @Zinhead - but that’s what happens to anyone who applies ED, which she’s being offered as an option here on the clear understanding they’ll take her. She doesn’t have to accept their proposal. Funnily enough, she’s actually been given an additional piece of information most kids don’t get, which is early notification that she’s clearly in range for the ED3 school, and what looks like an option on an early admit (albeit with a commitment to enroll). That might encourage her to hold out for RD at her reaches. Your criticism’s more of an indictment of ED in general, for the usual (valid) reasons. That Baylor thing seems like a whole other level.
Sounds like more fishing for full payers or equivalent.
Because an applicant who needs a significant amount of aid is going to know, this late in the process, that she needs to compare awards – and by late January all applications to competitive schools have already been submitted, so no real benefit to the applicant of an early answer.
She applied RD with the expectation of being able to compare acceptances at the end. The school is trying to convert an RD acceptance into an ED acceptance, with the threat that if she does not take the ED3 offer, she will be denied in the RD round. That is a lousy thing for a school to do.
@RustyTrowel or others - could you please name any/some of the “ED3” schools? I’m wondering what “level” they are and what other schools they’re trying to poach from.
I guess I’m not certain it’s as clear-cut as that, @Zinhead. Who’s to say that she’d be accepted RD, even if she’s terrific? This could be a case of “Tufts syndrome”, where they really like her but don’t want to waste an admit if she’s not coming. Alternatively, she may be a little less than they want, but they’re happy to have her if she’ll commit. So they make this proposal, where they show their hand, and see if that makes the sale. It sounds aggressive to me, but not evil.
For now, I am just going to have to let Kiddo play her cards, explaining the likely outcomes as I see them. She has a good hand–better than I had thought, apparently. But this school has accurately assessed the “fit” question. So Kiddo has some mulling over to do.
@GnocchiB, if I am not mistaken, UChicago has offered its deferred early applicants the chance to switch their applications to ED2. Not sure whether that school is what @RustyTrowel and @DeepBlue86 are talking about, though. The UChicago offer was probably sent to all deferred EA applicants and I do not think it was intended to increase pressure, though it could have that effect. The UChicago EA system underwent revision right before they started taking applications and the addition of ED and ED2 as options was likely not entirely understood by all applicant families. They were tinkering with ED2 even during this cycle. To be clear, UChicago is not calling this ED3 and neither is any other school. Not sure what the deadline for deferred applicants to convert was or whether they are still allowing it to go on.
To answer the second part of your question, and to use your word, they presumably would be trying to “poach” from HYPSM. But I am not sure that they are poaching. They are trying to protect yield, so perhaps that is the same thing. When UChicago was a strictly EA school, I bet they lost a certain number of early admits to HYPSM and they may be trying to prevent this.
If you read the University of Chicago board on CC, you know darn well that Chicago’s new EA/ED/ED2 system has ramped up the pressure on applicants to a considerable extent. Apparently, Chicago no longer makes public the number or composition of its early applications and early admissions. But before they went dark, they had already crossed the line of handing out more early admissions than regular ones – and thus likely admitting well more than half of its class EA. The perception now is that there was a huge advantage in applying ED this fall, and the many, many EA applicants who were deferred were all in a panic about whether to convert their applications to ED2. Many apparently have. Which in turn ramps up the pressure on people who were planning to apply RD, including many very strong candidates who are deferred SCEA applicants.
I am generally a huge University of Chicago fan – sometimes almost a shill – but this disturbs me. I thought Chicago’s old unrestricted EA policy was great, exactly what universities should do, except at the end I thought they were accepting too many people early. This year’s policy seems like an evil experiment to see just how low they can drive their acceptance rate, and to assess the cost of that in student quality and student anxiety, and its effect on the college’s character. It’s something of an institutionalized Tufts Syndrome, trying to assure that they admit the fewest number of people possible who might decide to go elsewhere. I hope they moderate it or abandon it next year. It’s not good for the applicants, and it’s not good for the university, either.
My example (not Chicago): RD -> school-initiated optional conversion from RD to ED2 (“ED3”) @JHS’s example (Chicago): EA -> deferred -> applicant-initiated optional conversion from EA-deferred to ED2
Next year, the other schools will pile on. RD becomes…steerage among the top ~20 schools.
UChicago just turns me off with its sleazy marketing, and now this blatant gaming of EA/ED. No matter how low its admission rate might be, in my mind, it is never going to be HYPSM.