<p>^ In this case I would call the school and ask.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s a causal relationship between applying early and getting admitted. The early pool is a self-selecting group of people who are definitely interested in the school and usually well qualified. During RD rounds, you’ll get tons of average students who apply to massive reaches because yolo. In reality, any student’s individual chance of acceptance is probably way higher or way lower than the school’s actual acceptance rate. The higher acceptance rates from early admission really strongly support that theory.</p>
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<p>Well, you don’t want to apply ED to any of those schools if your dream school is UCSD.</p>
<p>“I don’t think it’s a causal relationship between applying early and getting admitted.”</p>
<p>Full-pay cusp applicants can benefit from applying ED to need-aware schools. It helps such schools manage their limited financial aid funds.</p>
<p>Just to close the loop on the “does ED really boost chances or not” … what “we” know is that the perceived higher acceptance rate for ED at some schools is actually caused by the nature of the pool of ED applicants … recruited athletes, legacies, other connections and so forth. So, the actual rate for any one particuar student would actually be the same during ED, if not in fact, less. Just stating what we know. ;)</p>
<p>“the perceived higher acceptance rate for ED at some schools is actually caused by the nature of the pool of ED applicants”</p>
<p>This is likely the cause of most of the ED percentage increase at most schools that offer ED, not just some schools. For the rest of the increase, schools that say (e.g., in their CDS) they value “showing interest” value showing interest; applying ED is the best way to show interest. Admitting cusp applicants at ED time helps greatly with yield predictability at RD time; schools are in trouble if too many or too few accept at RD time. </p>
<p>I didn’t find ANY authoritative google hits stating that applying ED doesn’t help admission chances at most schools.</p>