Reply to Likelier to be accepted EA or regular application?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Likelier to be accepted EA or regular application?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This is all new to me.  Son is only a sophomore but I would appreciate some kind soul explaining the difference between early admission and early decision and what happens if you are accepted or not.[/quote]

With early decision (ED) you are committing to attend if accepted. You can only apply ED to one college. I agree that colleges love students who apply ED. They want kids who will be happy at the school and not drop out, with the added benefit that ED students' commitment to attend boosts the college's matriculation rates which is a factor in the USNWR rankings. As a consequence, at many schools that offer ED, the ED acceptance rate is higher than the regular admissions acceptance rate. The downside of ED is that, if you are applying for financial aid or hope to receive merit aid, you will not be able to compare offers from other schools. Once you get your ED acceptance, you are supposed to go to your high school's guidance counselor and withdraw all your other pending college applications. If you go to College Confidential you will see anecdotal stories about "some kid, somewhere" who didn't withdraw other applications and the ED acceptance was withdrawn. Generally, I think the only way you can get out of an ED acceptance is if your financial situation changes and/or the financial aid offer is insufficient, and you can make a credible case that you really, really can't afford to attend.

With early action (EA), you apply earlier and you find out earlier. But you are not committed to attending. You can apply to as many schools EA as you want (unless it's single choice early action, or SCEA). So if you get accepted EA at College #1 in November, but then in April College #2 comes in with a really generous merit aid offer, or maybe you just like College #2 better, then you are free to take College #2's offer.

You will hear that ED/EA are not that much of an advantage for unhooked kids, because they are used to get athletes to commit, so most of these ED/EA slots are going to athletes.  I'm not sure how true this is, and I would assume it differs from college to college. Unfortunately, colleges are never going to post that they use ED/EA as a recruitment tool, so there's no way to find out for a particular college you're interested in. I'll say this and it may be controversial:  in our experience, applying ED as a full pay student (not asking for aid, if you can do this) is a winning combination.

Not all colleges offer ED or EA or single choice early action (SCEA). Some schools like Harvard moved from ED to SCEA because of this perception that ED discourages kids who need financial aid and need to compare aid packages from different colleges.

So all of this obviously opens up a lot of strategizing. I'd recommend applying EA to a few schools and then ED at a first-choice school that's realistic given GPA and SATs. This is what my kid did. DC applied EA to some less selective schools (generally few extra essays, so it's easy to get the application in!) and got acceptances and merit aid by November. It was very nice to have these acceptances while DC was agonizing about the ED application results that were due out in December. Yes, it's fine to apply ED to one (and only one) school and have a bunch of EA applications out there. 
[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics