But if you got rid of ed then duke’s yield would go down. Which means it’s admit rate would go up. The duke loving kid would have a much higher chance of getting in rd than he does today. So the odds advantage of ed goes away. And the duke loving kid would still pick duke. Which is why the current system does not advantage the kids. Only the school.
But the duke loving kid today does not get to make the rules. So ed may be the best play under the current system. But that kid would be better off if duke got rid of ed.
I’m not so sure about this, for Duke or any other school.
If you eliminated ED, then RD students’ chance of admission would go up. But would an individual student’s chance of RD admission under the new system be as high as an individual student’s chance of ED admission under the current system?
@northwesty On your comment about showing love before 3/31.
I would think that should be true also but have not noticed it at all in the schools my son is applying to. His top choice has been absolutely silent to the point of being deafening. I think your thought is more appropriate to the top top kids with GPA’s above 4.5. My son is just an average candidate with a 4.0 and not particularly sought after like the top students are. Waiting until mid April is hard when you see most of the other students committing. Just part of the process.
@northwesty and @Marian, your analysis is making my head spin today for some reason. @-) @MassDa68 brings up the now timely point that waiting is difficult. Any remaining likely letters have trickled out (a couple seen a Yale and/or UChicago the last week or so) and surprise early admits/scholarships given to RD applicants have come and gone (as in Vanderbilt Mosaic thread). EDI/II are well and done. And EDIII, if it exists, is finished even at UChicago (see those threads). :-?
So what do you think about the timing of remaining RD results? Johns Hopkins notifying applicants on March 17 at 3:00 EST? Middlebury planned decision date is March 18 after 8:00 a.m. Ivy “Release Day” set for March 30? Is there now a competition between the schools as to which ones can “show the love” of admission first by racing to beat the others? Do the Ivies agree to release RD announcements on the same day, at the same time? Is there an arms race in admission offices to “staff up” to beat the competition by a week, two weeks, a day, several hours? Will yield be increased by sending RD decisions out first? This is now open for debate while we wait… :-w [-O<
@Martian The short answer is definitely not. The math isn’t equal that way. An LAC with a high ED admit rate may have an ED acceptance rate in the 35-40% range, an RD admit rate in the 12-14% range an an aggregate admit rate (which would mirror what it would look like with RD only) in the 17-18% range. So many more kids still apply RD than ED that if you eliminated ED it would bump the one single admit rate a couple points but not even remotely close to the admit rate on ED. Of course this varies by school. EA and SCEA rates tend to not be so radically removed from RD rates. But more and more the ED rates are far different. Some schools try to downplay this as being deceptive due to the recruited athletes and legacies in the ED round skewing the rate, while other schools are honest in promoting that ED is a clear advantage.
That Duke loving kid may not show the love in the right ways, might get rejected on his own, even if none of his cohort had been able to apply early.
ED only works for the kids who first hit the bullseye, then get the nod. It’s not the other way around: apply early, get some magic extra points, just for applying early.
I’m sure there are some students that would choose Chicago over the top Ivies but the yield numbers show it’s not many. It’s a great school it has a number of drawbacks compared to the Ivies. First of all it’s in a relatively bad location in Chicago. Secondly it has no school spirit because of weak D3 sports. Thirdly it has no conference identity. Here in coastal CA the all Ivies but Cornell are generally preferred to Chicago though I think the gap has narrowed in recent years because of the marketing effort that has greatly reduced the admission rate to Ivy levels. Having been through the cycle with five kids I have not seen a single student choose Chicago over any of the upper Ivies though I’m sure it happens.
@DeepBlue86 HYP do not have a choice of letting S out of the club. Stanford has surpassed Yale and Princeton in overall selectivity and desirability and it is (and more importantly perceived to be ) stronger as an overall university both domestically and abroad. Many tri-state area/New England prep school kids are increasingly ditching even Harvard (let alone Yale, Princeton) for Stanford.
@northwesty@DeepBlue86 Penn definitely gained ground since the 80,90s when it was considered along with Cornell the ivy safeties. It did this in part by aggressively pursuing ED. However, its rise was also in huge part because of the actual and very substantial changes done by President Judith Rodin to the school. She unlocked the huge potential the school had but was wasting due to incompetent administrators. She revamped liberal arts, research, the cohesiveness and synergies between the different schools of the university, pursued active engagement with the West Philly community and revamped the campus and surrrounding area. Gaming the rankings alone will not cut it, at least not for the long term. Real changes must also be implemented and these are what will sustain a schools rise.
I’m not sure what comment of mine you believe you’re responding to, @Penn95 - I don’t think I’ve ever suggested that S isn’t a peer of HYP (and certainly not on this thread, which is about early decision) - although I do think S’ location outside the Northeast sets it apart. S is clearly the most selective university in the country on the numbers alone. Many students still turn it down, though, I would guess usually in favor of H, Y or P (at least Parchment would suggest this). I think relative prestige is a subject for another thread.
Oh, I get it, @Penn95 - you’re rereading and reacting to post #299, where I said the following:
I stand by what I said - notwithstanding that Stanford’s a clear peer of HYP, it would do HYP (and particularly H) no good to admit it in this way. I wasn’t making an argument about relative prestige - again, I think that’s a subject for many other threads (see, for example, @Hunt’s genius invention of “prestigiosity” as measured in “milliHarvards”, or “mH”).
I must admit that having attended and worked at two different Ivies, I’ve always found the term “Ivy” and the shorthand “HYPS” ironic. While these universities all are highly competitive, their similarities end there. Harvard is vastly different from Princeton. In the broader Ivy League, there is little similarity in ethos, approach to education etc., between a Harvard or Columbia and a Dartmouth or Brown. Harvard and Columbia are vast, research-oriented universities; Princeton and Brown are overwhelming undergraduate (along with Dartmouth). This is reflected in their policies, approach to “pastoral” care, teaching styles etc.
When I visited schools, I was always stunned by how parents and students would talk about applying to five or six of the Ivy Group universities, almost thinking of them as interchangeable. To me that meant that they were basing their decision purely on rankings and prestige and hadn’t given much or any thought as to the individual universities. This was sad as we had many freshman who arrived and were unhappy. Had they done a bit more research, they probably would have made a better decision.
For what it’s worth – and this is presumably not the school @exlibris97 was referring to – Oberlin said in an information session in 2015 that it will reject students in the ED round who could have been admitted if they had applied RD. Another school which takes this approach is Notre Dame – it is well known that ND rejects students EA who would have been solid candidates for RD round, and that is why ND applicants should talk directly with their admissions rep about the preferred strategy for their specific application.
I don’t know why they do it, one would think that a simple deferral for at least qualified applicants would be sufficient. Perhaps it reduces the volume of non-serious candidates? Or minimizes the applications from kids who may be trying to “game” the ED system and may not really have a school as the absolute top choice, but are just trying to get in to the best possible school by committing through ED? Oberlin did say they do a financial aid pre-read for students considering ED so that they know the financial parameters before committing. I could imagine that process – of possible rejection and financial pre-reads – means the ED students you get are really going to attend.
Living in Indiana, we know many applicants to ND, and they are routinely advised not to apply EA to ND unless they are at the very tippy top of applicants, because the risk of rejection is real. Again, maybe it is to shrink the EA pool to students who are very serious about attending and could be admitted to top 10 schools, so that an EA acceptance increases the chances that student would be primed to accept ND, even if there are some spring acceptances to higher ranked schools?
The institutional priorities for admission shift over time as the class takes shape. Given the high volume of applicants, there is no particular reason for a college to hang on to an ED applicant who didn’t make the first cut .
All through the admissions process the admissions committee will be getting statistical and demographic data back as to the cumulative effect of the decisions they have made so far. And that will shift the focus as the admissions process continues.
I’ve always felt that ED could not possibly be a boost for a weaker, unhooked candidate – why would a school possibly want to take in students from the lower end of their ED pool?
But RD may be advantageous for many students if their attributes happen to coincide with the apparent needs of the college as the class is shaping up. These may be students with more lopsided profiles, or students who bring some sort of diversity factor.
The problem that Notre Dame has is that so many of the ED applicants come from the same socio-economic background, i.e. white Catholics from Chicago and Northern Indiana. If you are an active Catholic from that region, Notre Dame is more often than not the number one choice for college. I hear recurring stories how ND rejected the valedictorian of some south side or west suburban Catholic high school.
Unfortunately for that group, ND wants to be a national university, and can’t take the bulk of it’s class from a narrow demographic. For these kids, a rejection instead of a more polite deferral probably convinces them that they need to look elsewhere and not get hung up waiting on something that will not happen.
If a student is good enough to be admitted RD, where the odds are much steeper, and has committed to attend (and is therefore “serious”) by applying ED, why would Oberlin deny them rather than just defer them?
Maybe it’s just an acknowledgement of how random and labor-intensive the process is. Oberlin only wants to carry so many applications forward to the RD round, so they deny a bunch of ED applicants who are acceptable but interchangeable with some of the kids they anticipate they’ll see in the RD pool and admit then. The benefit to Oberlin of clearing their desk in this way outweighs the modest yield risk they take by knowingly removing from consideration a number of kids who were committed enough to Oberlin at one point that they applied ED there. It sure sounds odd, though.
I can understand it better at ND, where there’s a lopsided applicant pool, plus EA is non-binding and therefore there’s no commitment by the applicant (unless they’re so good that it’s clear they decided to forgo an SCEA app at a tippy-top in order to apply to ND - in which case ND might choose to admit them EA). One can see why ND might deny a bunch of very-good-but-not-clearly-tops Midwestern Catholics early just because they know there are plenty more who’ll take an ND offer later. Also, I’m guessing that because of its niche status, ND cares less about yield than Oberlin.
But the suggestion above is that it would have happened had they applied RD? I have to agree with @DeepBlue86, the is not logical reason why applying RD @ Oberlin should get you an acceptance when ED would not. If the school doesn’t want to commit without seeing all of the applicants for a year, then deferral makes sense.
Rejecting kids and then saying “if they had applied RD some would have gotten in” sounds wrong. If it was said in an information session, it feels like there would have been context that might explain a particular situation. Also…information session presenters are not always correct.
The only other reason I can think of is they have some statistical basis for believing that deferred EA/ED kids have a lower yield rate in RD. Once a kid professes their love for a school that isn’t returned with an ED acceptance, maybe those schools find the kids turn elsewhere and fall in love with another. RD kids have less time to make up their minds. Just a theory.