Just got an email saying I didn’t get in off the waitlist 
@Neurogirl07 Ditto
Much as I admire Chicago, it seems that the RD acceptance rate figure given in the series below is a tad misleading, because the RD rate includes deferred students. As a result, it’s not very helpful for students crafting an admissions strategy.
Overall Acceptance rate: 7.7%
EA Acceptance rate: 11%
RD Acceptance rate: 4%
Deferred Student RD Acceptance rate: 1%
After the EA round, “just over 1,200” received admissions offers from about 11,400 applications (alumni email). After the RD round, the College issued 2,356 offers, meaning that approximately 1,156 offers were made in the regular round. If the College admitted 4% in the regular round, then that means it considered close to 29,000 applications (28,900x.04=1,056), which obviously includes deferred EA applicants (the College reported only 30,162 applications overall). The flaw is that the deferred EA applicants are a much weaker pool, as compared to the RD applicants whose applications are being considered for the first time. Schools have a strong preference to admit students early, so deferred students are highly unlikely to be offered admission, something that’s particularly true at Chicago, because the school apparently issues very few rejections in the EA round (with 30,162 applicants and 1,200 EA offers, the remaining total pool of applicants is about 29,000–about exactly what it takes to get the right number of RD admits with the 4% number provided).
If one assumes that no student is rejected EA, then 1% admits among deferred EA applicants results in about 100 offers ((11,400 EA apps - 1,156 EA offers) x .01) = approx. 110. So, for the students whose applications were considered for the first time in the RD round, there were a total of about 1,046 offers (2,356 total - 1,200 EA - 110 Deferred EA) among 18,762 applications (30,162 total - 11,400 EA), or about 5.6%.
For a student considering EA vs. not EA, the appropriate comparison would seem to be EA admit rate to RD admit rate for students whose applications are considered for the first time in the Regular round. At Chicago, the Class of 2019 numbers are about 10.5% EA (1,200/11,400) and RD is 5.6% (as set out above)–approximately a 2:1 ratio. At Harvard, by comparison, the EA rate was 16.5% (977/5,919). Harvard, to my knowledge, does not publish results for RD admits who were EA defers, but the first time RD rate for Class of 2019 can be no better than about 3%. Harvard received 37,305 total applicants, made 977 EA offers, and deferred 4,292 applicants. So, Harvard considered 32,306 applications for the first time in the RD round. With 1,103 RD offers, even if a first-time RD applicant got every single spot that was offered in the RD round, the first-time RD admit rate would only be 3.1% (1,103/32,306)–if any deferred applicant received an RD spot, then the first-time RD number would be lower. Thus the Harvard EA-to-First-time RD ratio is over 5:1 (16.5%:3.1%(max)).
There are other variables not considered, including quality of the EA pool at Chicago v. Harvard and influence of Restrictive (Harvard) v. Non-Restrictive (Chicago) EA. But, as a general proposition, a student with some prospect of gaining admission to both Harvard and Chicago is much better off using the EA “bullet” on the Harvard application. My guess is that Chicago publishes a misleadingly low RD number to try and “scare” future (top) candidates into applying EA to Chicago (which would prevent them from applying early to an REA school like Harvard). The data seem to show, however, that a strong student can wait for the regular round at Chicago, and still have a solid chance of getting in.
SSN137 - Astute observations, I think.
Thanks, Kaukauna, although I didn’t mean to come as critical of Chicago, which at least has the courage to practice non-restrictive EA, along with schools like MIT and Caltech. The gold standard is SCEA, because those schools require the best students to declare their love, but then don’t mind if they play the field after the EA round–if a student in the HYPS realm is admitted after SCEA, then either H,Y,P, or S can be fairly confident that that the student will come, especially because first-look RD admission rates are so poor at peer institutions in the HYPS stratosphere. On the other hand, ED schools are the least courageous, because they demand a marriage commitment if the school makes a proposal. So, the RD admit pool at a place like Columbia must be somewhat weaker as compared to the overall super-elite pool (let’s say the Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, and Chicago–leaving aside ne’er-do-well RD practitioners like Duke). This is because, in the main, a student who had a legitimate shot at HYPS, either via SCEA or via pickup in the regular round, would likely not choose to “risk” consummating a forced marriage to an ED school. One can quibble with the various ranking methodologies, but yield is generally a good predictor for market demand–at least when comparing schools who practice SCEA or non-restrictive EA, where students can rank choices from an open field. Yield for RD schools is a bit trickier, because 100 percent of the RD admits (theoretically) must choose the RD school. It may be true that the choice to pursue ED is market action, but as mentioned, the early pool at an RD school is likely a weaker subset within the super-elite applicant pool. Chicago (and MIT/Caltech) at least have the guts to compete straight-up–they may get the “also rans” from the HYPS sweepstakes, but the overall academic capability of those students overall is better than at any RD school, provided one accepts standardized test scores/GPA as a proxy for ability.
^Excellent analysis, ssn137.