<p>I was looking at the NY Time chart on early decision and early action Admit rates for 2010 and they all appear to be quite reasonable-in the 25% to 35% range for places like Dartmouth, Penn, Northwestern and Duke. Why then do students forego what looks to be a reasonable process to participate in the mass slaughter that comes in April? It appears that all these colleges inflate their acceptance rates at the early cycle to aritifically crush the masses in April.</p>
<p>ED means that you’re locked in to attend if you’re accepted, so it should only be used on a top choice. All of the schools you named are ED. This is pretty obvious…</p>
<p>Do you truly have a first choice school? If not, ED is not for you. The benefit of RD is the ability to compare choices. Choices of schools and choices of financial aid. If you truly have the stat to get into a top school, you can get into some with RD applications as well. My son applied to 13 shcools, including a couple on your list, a few years ago RD and got into 12 of them. It still took him till almost the last day to decide where to go. He ended up picking a financial safety rather than those that are higly ranked.</p>
<p>I didn’t apply EA anywhere because I took more tests and wanted my Nov and Dec tests on my app. </p>
<p>I’m sure a lot of people are lazy and don’t fill out the applications in time too, or don’t know about EA or ED.</p>
<p>EA - Usually for Colleges to admit people with hooks (such as recruited athlete). Most people with no hooks won’t really have a chance here.</p>
<p>ED - Commits you to that one school. If you get accepted, you have to withdraw all your other apps (unless the FA is insufficient).</p>
<p>Not only that, but out of all the Ivies, only Yale offers Early Action, and that’s Single Choice Early Action, which means that if you were to apply to the Ivies early, it would be through ED and that would be binding. Many students prefer to have freedom of choice.</p>
<p>Why not EA:
- can’t get teacher recs in time
- want another try at SAT or ACT, or need SAT II
- not finished with essay
- expect upward trend in GPA 1st semester Sr. year</p>
<p>Why not ED:
all the above, plus:
- not certain of college choice
- need to compare financial aid offers</p>
<p>I agree that EA stats are inflated due to Recruited Athlete and Legacy being a significant portion of this round.</p>
<p>Money is a big factor. If you are accepted ED, you agree to attend no matter what the sticker price is for your family. If you need to compare aid packages to make college affordable, you can’t do that with ED.</p>
<p>A long-standing critique of ED is that it privileges the wealthy who don’t need to care about college costs.</p>
<p>Early decision does not make top schools much easier, some schools say there is no boost at all.</p>
<p>The percent admitted ED is much higher because the vast majority of those accepted in the early round have hooks. Half of all the early admits at these schools are recruited athletes. Another sizable group are legacies. Then there’s staff kids and development kids.</p>
<p>My DS applied ED to Dartmouth. We were advised to use ED to separate him from the other highly qualified kids applying from our very crowded pool. It worked. But he had near perfect grades and scores. I believe this is the type of unhooked candidate who gets a boost ED at top schools, not kids with lower stats thinking it’s easier to get in ED.</p>