@NateJ21 Your most accurate source for projecting the odds of acceptance is your high school guidance office, in particular if they use Naviance or another tool to plot and collect data on prior applications.
The majority of students who are offered admissions come from a combination of the ED and EA pool. One advantage to applying ED is that you may likely get a 2nd look during EA if you are deferred. In contrast, last year it seems that a pretty low number of EA applicants who were deferred to RD were admitted.
@NateJ21 if Virginia Tech is your first choice you should do ED – I suspect next year will be even more difficult to get in with all the 2020 grads that deferred this year.
If its your first choice, it certainly can’t hurt to apply ED. If nothing else, you will hear earlier (unless you are deferred). That said, VT has previously indicated that their standards for ED are often higher than EA. As @ShenVal18 points out, if you don’t meet the ED standards, you are likely to get deferred to EA.
thank you all. Great points. as you noted above, this will be a busy application year with a number of students deferring…so spots are already taken up before this cycle even starts!!
I am confused as to why VT’s standards for ED are higher than EA - all other schools have higher acceptance rates for ED (improves their yield)…VT’s ED rate is lower. why would they do that?
We will confer with our guidance office and likely go this route - even if deferred it gives another bite at the apple as you noted.
@Nate321 That might have something to do with the college of engineering. A large portion of EDs are for the COE and they obviously can accept only so many people through ED. Just my thoughts.
I’m on year 4 of VT admissions cycle/forums and I don’t recall seeing anywhere from the school that the standards are any different for ED admissions. What is at play however is the likelihood that students have thought ED was an easier path (“I’m showing VT is my #1, so they will accept me”) and there has probably been an uptick in borderline applicants who applied ED, resulting in a lower offer rate.
thank you both. helpful. i can see that (rush to COE and high amount of borderline)…frankly, the latter is why we are thinking about ED here. he ‘should’ be good to be accepted per Naviance and Niche, but not certain and thought ED would help chances (think VT is looking for more certainty for yield too given dorm and other challenges). He is applying to Business school, which is strong, but I don’t think as highly competitive as COE.
Personally, I thin US News and World Report has more accurate data compared to Niche but that’s just my opinion. You may want to refer to that source. I hope it works out for you