<p>Definitely apply ea to wherever you can, as long as you know you have spent a long time on the applications. It has been a perennial struggle for ea applicants to make sure their applications are great-they don’t know if they have spent enough time on them, etc
This was not meant to scare you, just explain that it might be harder to do ea. If you think you can do it in the right amount of time, go for it!</p>
<p>EA is awesome and I agree with Marshfrog - you should do it whenever you can. That way, in December, you’ll either have some good schools lined up, or you’ll have some rejections that tell you to improve your application or lower your sights. You can even trim your RD list if you get enough EA acceptances!</p>
<p>Stanford’s option is “Single Choice” Early Action (SCEA). That means Stanford expects you will not apply to any other school’s early program during the SCEA decision-making period (although you are not required to give a final answer to a Stanford offer until the RD deadline). So SCEA is restrictive; ordinary EA is not.</p>
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<p>You can look up the admit rates for Stanford RD and SCEA. The SCEA rates will be higher, but the difference does not necessarily translate to an N% advantage for an individual applicant. For one thing, we are not talking about two identical applicant pools. So the significance of the different rates is a little hard to interpret. The SCEA pool presumably gets more legacies, more full-pay applicants, and maybe more athletes. Some of those factors may be boosting chances as much as the SCEA choice per se.</p>