“if the student had applied RD, they might well have been admitted.”
And might well not have been. Don’t forget that.
Why is anyone assuming those kids would magically become more desirable than in the Early round? You’re thinking of bullets like yield. Realize most kids present similarly. And a deferral just restarts the process, the kid is fully reviewed, fresh. “Might well” is mighty vague.
ND is very clear that it is harder to be accepted at the REA stage than RD. They really only want to see above average applicants at that stage. They want to make most of their decisions at the RD stage. MIT and Georgetown (both EA not ED) are similar.
Probably not true that you could get accepted RD at ND but rejected EA. ND accepts about 25% of its REA applicants and defers another 25%.
If you are in the bottom half of the REA applicant pool, you probably are not likely to wind up in the top 19% of the overall applicant pool. Georgetown automatically defers EVERY EA application over to RD. ND (which makes more sense to me) goes ahead and makes more final decisions at the EA stage.
Also, the way that ND’s REA rules intersect with the other school rules means that ND REA prevents applying anywhere else SCEA or ED.
The context might be to discourage people from applying ED under the mistaken belief that it improves chances of admission, particularly if there are factors that could strengthen an application later.
Applications submitted RD might be different than the ED application because of differences in the application itself – things that happen over the course of the first half of senior year that present a different picture.
A big difference between ED & RD is the opportunity to see the mid-year grade report. It is of course possible for an ED applicant to be deferred because the ad com wants to see the fall semester grades, but if there is nothing particularly distinctive about that applicant – no particular reason to hang onto them either. But with an RD applicant with strong fall semester grades, the issue that might have been of concern in the ED round might not even be noticed in the RD round. (Let’s say hypothetically the kid seem to have an “off” semester spring of junior year - not horribly bad, but more B’s than typical of the rest of the transcript - but fall semester senior year is very strong. In the ED round the fall off might look like a worrisome trend; in RD, with fall grades in hand, it looks like a minor blip, one that might even be explained by a letter from the g.c.)
@lookingforward The reason colleges can be harsher on the ED pool than the RD one is that they don’t know what the overall pool will look like and so err on the side of caution. This is especially the case where special circumstances are involved or where the student’s competitiveness would have benefitted from seventh semester grades. When I worked in admissions, students on the cusp were often admitted in the RD round when they would have been rejected during ED.
@eclibris97 Just pointing out, it was others who were baffled.
If they would have been rejected in ED, why would you be looking at them in the RD round? Doesn’t that imply deferral? I can understand that colleges can be harsher in the early round, but doesn’t erring on the side of caution logically imply that they should defer the candidates on the cusp?
I absolutely think ED should be abolished because it is inherently unfair to some families - those that financially need to compare offers. But I understand it is not going away.
It seems like what a college does re ED depends on what it thinks will happen in RD. If they think better candidates will show up via RD, and that they will get good yield out of a decent percentage of them, why fill up the space via ED (especially if they are concerned about the economic bias inherent in current ED process). On the other hand, if they think that the ED kids they are seeing might choose to go elsewhere in RD, why not snag them and have a class with lots of people who’ve affirmatively made the school their first choice. I think both approaches are defensible though the trend does seem to be the latter.