Yale, Stanford, and Harvard are known to have REA. Does applying REA increase the chances of admission as much as applying ED?
Asked and answered a million times here.
File it under “it is what it is.” You cannot apply to HYS ED. The acceptance rates for REA are higher, but Harvard has gone on record as saying that they will not accept and applicant REA that they would have rejected RD. Plus when you take the athletic recruits and legacies out of the REA numbers, the acceptance rate drops
So if you’re asking if applying REA to Harvard has the same boost as applying ED to Columbia, then no.
Thanks for clarifying. That makes sense. Does the same go for all the other REA schools, like Yale? Am I right in thinking that there is not really an advantage to REA unless you are an athletic recruit or a legacy applicant?
Pretty much.
I’m of the opinion that there is no system to be gamed. If Yale is your first choice , apply REA. If it’s not your first choice, don’t.
sorry, kind of sub-question. Is applying ED or REA as a student-athlete or legacy more beneficial than the other? (I know there are probably no exact stats, this is more of an opinion question.)
If you are a recruited athlete, you are pretty much required to apply EA/ED. In terms of legacy, it depends on the college. Penn, as an example, basically says that lehhacy advantage only applies ED.
Although this about Penn / legacy / ED seems to be repeated often on these forums, Penn itself says:
https://www.alumni.upenn.edu/s/1587/gid2/16/interior.aspx?sid=1587&gid=2&pgid=20995
In other words, legacy is given more consideration during ED than during RD, but that does not necessarily mean that legacy is given no consideration during RD.
In the lawsuit multi-year sample, the acceptance rates were as follows. I am only considering years for which REA was offered:
Overall Admit Rate
REA: 23.6% accepted
RD: 3.6% accepted
The ALDC hooked kids are overrepresented among REA applicants, while URM hooks and low SES preference are overrepresented among RD applicants. If I exclude all the ALDC hook kids that favor REA applicants, which includes legacies and athletes, then the admit rate becomes:
Non-ALDC Hook Admit Rate
REA: 14.5% accepted
RD: 3.2% accepted
The REA admit rate was 4.5x larger for non-ALDC kids. It’s possible that the REA applicant pool of unhooked kids was just stronger. The internal analysis found that in 2016, 50% of early applicants had high academic 1-2 rating compared to 38% of RD applicants, suggesting that there is indeed a larger portion of high stat kid in the REA sample. Although the specific percentages will change when you exclude ALDC hooks, and the decreased portion of applicants with URM and./or low SES preference in REA will also have an impact. There are many variables that need to be considered.
One of the lawsuit analyses did a regression that controlled for all of these variables – ALDC hook status, URM hook status, all of the available ratings including academic, and many other factors. Among kids with similar hook status and similar ratings, the lawsuit analysis suggests a 4.6x odds ratio advantage for applying early. This suggests applying early is not as strong as an ALDC hook, but is a significant advantage.
The standard error of this applying early advantage was far smaller than most ALDC hooks, suggesting that applying early may be a more consistently applied advantage than other types of hooks (larger sample size is also important). For example, the analysis suggests that the apparent REA advantage for similarly applicants (similar hook status, similar reader ratings) has a ~1 in 100 quindecillion chance of happening randomly (1 in 10^50) compared to a 1 in ~3 million chance for apparent admission advantage for kids on the Dean/Director’s special interest list to happen randomly. The Dean/Director’s special interest list appears to be a stronger boost on average, but the degree of that boost seems has more variation, and there is a smaller sample. As such, the analysis suggests we can be far more confident that applying REA is an admissions advantage than we can for being on the Dean/Director’s special interest list.
Suffice to say, I think the Harvard quotes about REA not offering an advantage are misleading. They may mean something like they aren’t admitting unqualified applicants who would not make it past the first round, and the preferences more relate to later rounds with more subjective factors. This type of misleading statement about whether applying early offers an advantage is common at other colleges besides Harvard. For example, in another recent thread about whether ED offered an advantage at Tufts, someone linked the Tufts post at https://admissions.tufts.edu/blogs/inside-admissions/post/is-it-easier-to-get-in-ed-2/ in which the Tufts admission director stated:
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While there are no exact stats, there are several studies that address this question. For example, the study at http://ephblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Impact-of-Legacy-on-Undergrad-Admissions.pdf looks at the impact of legacy on college admissions at 30 highly selective colleges. It found the following odds ratios for legacy + EA vs legacy + RD, suggesting a notably preference for EA among primary legacies, but not secondary legacies. The author writes, “These findings reveal clearly that primary legacies must choose an early application route to realize the full benefit of their admissions advantage.”
Primary Legacy + EA – Odds Ratio = 15.5
Primary Legacy + RD – Odds Ratio = 5.5
Secondary Legacy + EA – Odds Ratio = 1.9
Secondary Legacy + RD – Odds Ratio = 2.0
I expect the reality is more nuanced, with a wide variation of degree of boost among the 30 colleges – variation in degree of legacy advantage, variation in EA/ED/REA advantage, and variation in + EA/ED/REA advantage. I’d make a similar statement for the colleges listed in your initial post. For example, I would not assume that applying early offers the same degree of advantage at Harvard and Stanford, for both legacies and non-legacies. I also would not assume ED at school x always offers a greater/lesser advantage than REA at school y. Instead it depends on many additional factors.
Thank you very much for your reply! This is very helpful and interesting! I apologise if I am missing something because I am new, but what does ALDC mean? Athlete, legacy, DC?
Athletic recruirs, legacy, Dean’s Interest List, Children of faculty and staff.
From a number of analyses I have seen EA , including REA tends to confer an advantage of RD. That is not the case for every school. MIT, notably did not show much or any advantage. There are other schools that might also be the same. It’s difficult to tell how much of an advantage early action confers because a lot of specialty admissions are taken early such as athletes and other categories discussed above.
IMO, and this is just that, there often is a bit of a boost because psychologically we are more generous in allowing entrance into an empty room rather than one verging on full. I know Admissions Directors, and the ones I know truly like being ADMISSIONS directors , not REJECTION Directors. They want to get that class filled and they love accepting qualified , interested students. At the beginning of the admissions season, they are fresh to start accepting students, there aren’t as many applications, and they have their wishlists from the various parts of the school that they want fulfill. The essays are new—they haven’t read the 100th essay about how grandmom is the most wonderful person in a students life, how all people from around the world are so alike, how that winning touchdown after a trying season felt, etc etc. The first applications have that advantage. By the time the RD season arrives, certain patterns emerge, and what sounds unusual, marvelous, remarks, talented may also be very common that year. So there is that advantage being early. Also, a lot of kids, mine included really are done with their applications if they send out a batch of EA apps and get accepted by a school they like. Back a few years ago ,BC with just plain old EA would snag a lot of kids I know because once they were accepted there, some kids were content enough that they saw no point in applying to other colleges. They were done. I know my youngest was perfectly happy with his early list and decided that if he were denied or deferred from his ED school, he would pick from the EA schools that accepted him. He could just enjoy his senior year and not have to deal with applications anymore and move on to anticipating his college experience. He was set.
Most schools will give stronger consideration for ED because it’s a good deal for the schools too. They have a certain set of student established and locked in for the year. There is that fear for many AOs that they do not fill their class or that they don’t meet the requests made by various departments in the school if it’s all a crap shoot in spring. Nice to get that checklist secured early. ED helps the school quite s bit in meeting their needs.