<p>come on! there must be more students out there interested in Dickinson? who's interviewed? who's applying? early decision people, you must be getting ready to send in those apps... anyone applying early action instead? somebody say something!</p>
<p>I am strongly encouraging my son to apply early action. (why not??) Wife says they like an interview so we will have to set that up at some point.</p>
<p>dickinson really encourages people to apply ED. i agree with you that applying early action is better than regular, but it doesn't give the same advantage as ED. when we attended an info session with my D the dickinson admissions officer openly said that it was easier to get in ED than regular. avg SAT scores need to be higher if you want to get in regular... EA might be slightly easier than regular, because it shows an added degree of interest and there are still plenty of slots left (even after the ED slots are filled)...</p>
<p>Just wanted to let you know that my S is a first year student at Dickinson-he loves it there-is working hard, but enjoys his classes and has made terrific friends. If you are seriously interested in Dickinson, an interview is a good idea.</p>
<p>my D has requested an alumni interview, since the college is 4+ hours drive. we visited last spring, but 8 or 10 hrs of driving for a 30 min interview doesn't seem like a good use of time, especially when she's got a lot of schoolwork and applications to finish. we are attending a reception in our area for prospective students this weekend, so hopefully that will show "sufficient" interest! it's really a bit insane how much you have to do to prove to some of these colleges that you really are interested and not just applying for the heck of it...</p>
<p>I've heard EA is even MORE competitive than Regular. Can anyone confirm?</p>
<p>yes it says that on one of the brochures i've got..</p>
<p>if EA is even more competitive than regular, then what does that say? are they using EA to sift through the applicants to decide which ones they really want to encourage to attend dickinson? or to eliminate the applicants who aren't sufficiently motivated to apply ED? i don't see why it would be even more competitive... dickinson isn't making any more of a commitment to EA applicants than they are to regular decision applicants... does anyone have any insight to this?</p>
<p>My son went EA because ED is too restrictive. He's very interested and is being recruited as an athlete, but wouldn't commit to ED due to service academy applications pending.</p>
<p>I can't tell you how Dickinson looks at it, but another school (JMU) is very clear. They tell you that they only admit the very best from the EA pool and defer the rest to the regular admit pool, where you may have a good chance of getting admitted even after being deferred. This is very different from many ED schools, where they might give you the benefit of the doubt and admit you ED, while the people that are deferred have very little chance of being accepted in the RD round.</p>
<p>ok, this is a dumb question, but what school is JMU?</p>
<p>^James Madison University. </p>
<p>NJres's theory was the same as mine: they probably defer borderline EA candidates to the RD pool. That doesn't mean that the standards for EA are higher, only that the admit rate for that round looks lower.</p>
<p>BTW, as at most colleges, ED at Dickinson has a slightly lower admissions bar; when we visited the admissions officer was pretty up front about that.</p>
<p>i would go one step farther than MarathonMan88 regarding ED at Dickinson... they try to "scare" you into applying ED. they make it sound like a breeze to get in ED and practically impossible to get in RD. when you analyze their stats, you can see why: their yield in the RD pool is very low. so, obviously they feel a need to lock in as many good students under the binding ED program or else watch them slip away to the competition during RD... it is not a commentary on dickinson as much as it is about the craziness of the process! students are forced to play the ED game and then submit way too many app's for RD. so, it's no wonder that the yield is low for RD (too many kids submitting too many apps and having too many choices RD...)</p>
<p>I actually find D's policies--for their particular demographic situation--both sane and humane. They admit a 1st-yr. class that's 100-200 students larger than many of their peer institutions and do so without much compromise in the quality of the entering class. (The admit almost as many students ED as the whole freshman class at some overlaps!)</p>
<p>The formula for achieving this is to have a sky-high ED rate, but quite humanely, they don't defer large numbers of borderline applicants into the RD round, where they'd yield at a high rate. The consequence is that their RD yield looks artificially low, but the flip side of this is that they are admitting something like 7-8 students RD for each remaining seat in the class. If D. were turning away many, many superbly qualified students RD, you can bet that they'd trim the ED acceptance rate correspondingly.</p>
<p>It seems to me that their unique situatino is also a function of where Dickinson falls in the pecking order: they get some students who apply as reach candidates, kids who are probably looking at similar institutions, but also plenty who are using D. as a safety to top 20 universities and LACs. (If you move down just a bump in selectivity, you're no longer in the bracket where there are many students "using" you as a safey while applying to 10-15 other schools.)</p>
<p>If Harvard or Swarthmore had an ED rate of over 60%, it would be an outrage, but in this particular case, I can see the institutional interests that are served. It's also must boost campus culture to have a freshman class where a majority arrives in September looking around, heaving a sigh, and thinking "this is exactly where I wanted to be!"</p>
<p>Marathonman88 you certainly give a "sane and humane" explanation of dickinson's admissions strategy. i guess it works for them... it just seems to me that they push a little too hard for ED applications and that works to the disadvantage to students who are honestly interested in attending dickinson, but don't feel comfortable committing themselves so early in the process... personally, i hope that most colleges will follow H&P in dumping ED/EA (or at least limit early admits to a small -- 10 percent-ish -- amount of the freshman class. 50 pct (and higher) ED is just ridiculous and it is not fair to students while being a very one-sided advantage to the college. colleges are taking advantage of the stress and insecurities of h.s. seniors regarding the very subjective admissions process of selective institutions.</p>
<p>fairburn, we definitely agree on the main issue: if the % of a class that's admitted ED is inflated to the point that significantly stronger students from the RD round are getting shut out, then it's troubling. My thought is that that threshold can vary depending on an institution's demographics; it's hard to say that it should be around 10% or 30% . . . even 60+% may not be unreasonable for Dickinson.</p>
<p>It would be interesting to know whether the students just below the RD admissions cusp at a school like Dickinson are significantly stronger than, say, the bottom 15-20% of those admitted ED. It seems intuitive that they'd keep the ED bar set pretty close to the point where they can fill up that large class and still maximize the academic profile, but who knows?</p>
<p>dickinson is blunt about how much more "competitive" RD is as compared to ED... i would say that it is a near certainty that weaker students are admitted ED (not all of them, of course, but as you say "the bottom 15-20%")... for example, avg SAT's of accepted students during the RD is significantly higher than ED students. i heard this directly from an admissions officer at the info session that i attended with my daughter last spring.</p>
<p>Thanks that's important information to have. The day we did the tour they were much more circumspect, saying just standard-issue things like "our ED rate admit rate is much higher." It sounds like the bump you get at Dickinson is far more than the standard one. It makes sense now that I think about it. Their ED admit rate is high, but not out of line with some peers, but the % of the class admitted through ED really is extraordinarily high.</p>
<p>Here's a footnote to the ED/RD discussion. USNews made available stats on ED vs. RD admit rates that gives some context for where Dickinson falls in the ED-admissions game spectrum:</p>
<p>The bottom line is that although the % of Dickinson's incoming class admitted ED is very high, the difference between the admit rate for the ED pool vs. RD is in the middle of the pack, presumably reflecting a low yield from the RD pool. It seems, then, that applying ED gives marginal candidates a significant advantage, but that Dickinson is not denying superbly qualified candidates in the ED pool in order to gain the institutional advantages of admitting a significant number ED either. I'm sticking with my "sane and humane" theory and giving D. high marks: they could probably defer a lot of marginal ED-ers into the regular pool, admit most of them knowing that the vast majority would enroll, thus boosting their yield rate, but they don't.</p>
<p>i still feel that dickinson reaches too far down into the ED/EA pool. 62 pct of the freshman class is admitted early! they are not in the best company among the other liberal arts colleges when you look only at that stat...</p>