Let’s Get Tactical: Early Application Alphabet Soup

In today’s episode, I dive into the differences between Early Action, Early Decision, and ED2. I break down how each option can impact your college admissions strategy, what types of students might benefit from each path, and how to decide which is the best fit for you. If you’re navigating college applications and wondering how to increase your chances of acceptance, this episode is packed with insights to help you make informed decisions.

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Transcript

Sheila Akbar: 0:00

First, let's start with some definitions. We have two basic categories of application. We have the early application, and we have the regular application. And there is a slight complicating wrinkle in that, because there is a type of early application that is submitted at the same time as regular decision applications are but you still get notified early, so we still call them early, right. Hi folks, welcome back to the podcast. It is past mid September now, and it is starting to feel like fall. Even here in LA we finally got through our ridiculous heat wave, and now it's nice and cool. And I know everybody is thinking pumpkin spice and warm sweaters and things like that. You know, that really puts me in the mood of thinking about that kind of traditional academic experience where you're on a leafy college campus and the colors are starting to change, and everybody's bright eyed and bushy tailed and excited to learn and meet new people and get into the swing of things. Of course, that's not how it always feels for a high schooler, but you know, that's how we like to romanticize it as adults, right? But anyway, today I wanted to give you all sort of a short primer on early applications. My seniors are all aiming for this November 1, sometimes November 15, deadline, and they made their decisions about where to apply early at some point over the summer, though, I do have a few students who are like, let's just prepare everything, and I'll make a last minute decision on whether I actually want to do Early Decision. And if these terms are not familiar to you, have no fear. That's what today's episode is about. I'm going to run through definitions of these different early application types and who they might be most relevant for and how to think about them. So this may be of use to some of you who are working with seniors, but I really do hope this will be very informative for all of those of you who have juniors or sophomores or even freshmen, so you kind of know what the landscape looks like and when you should be starting to think about some of these things first. Let's start with some definitions. We have two basic categories of application. We have the early application, and we have the regular application, and there is a slight complicating wrinkle in that, because there is a type of early application that is submitted at the same time as regular decision applications are, but you still get notified early, so we still call them early, right? So here, get ready for a bunch of acronyms. We have EA, ED, ED two and rd. So EA is early action. Now the main feature of early action is that you apply early, you hear back early, and you don't have to give the college your decision until May 1, or whatever their decision date is, whether you're going to accept their offer or not. So it's non binding. Means you get in, you don't have to go, even if you get in, but you just get that information early. You apply early, usually by November 1 or November 15, depending on the school, and you get notified of the college's decision earlier than you would had you applied regular decision. So this has changed a little bit in the last couple of years. Early action used to come back in December, at some point where, you know, students would hear and then they might not even need to submit other applications for regular decision. But many early action programs have now changed their notification date to late January or early February. That's still earlier than you would hear back for regular decision, which is usually by the end of March, but it's not all that much earlier, unless you are applying. Here are some caveats, single choice early action or restricted early action. And these are modifications of that early action plan. You will actually hear back from those schools in December, and the single choice, or the restriction on it is that they may bar students from applying early decision to any other school or applying to any other early actions with, you know, several exceptions. Maybe it's a public university or universities that base scholarship decisions on early action. They don't want to stop students from being able to access that. So these can get quite complicated. It's really important to keep track of. What kind of early action policy the colleges you may be applying to actually have in place, and is a little bit of like an LSAT logic game of piecing together. Okay, if I apply early here, that means I can't do this, or I can't do that, and you have to make sure all the pieces fit together. It is valuable to note that early action does show a bit of an increase in the acceptance rate at colleges. Generally, you can look up the specific information of what the acceptance rate is for early action for your specific colleges. Usually, this is reported on the college's common data set. You could just Google that that is publicly available, but sometimes you're gonna have to do a little math to figure out what is actually the early action acceptance rate. And I'll say this again, when we're talking about early decision and early decision two, as much as possible, you kind of want to dig into what is increasing that acceptance rate in the early pools, because at a lot of schools, it may be that they take all of their recruited athletes in the early round, and that is actually significantly increasing the acceptance rate, but that doesn't necessarily mean your non athlete student has a better chance in early action, right? You also want to remember this holds for all of the other early pools, the students who have their materials together and are confident that this is the highest quality that they can put together, and that kind of got all their ducks in a row. They worked ahead of time, right? They spent a lot of time Junior spring, building their college list and maybe even starting to write their essays. And they made sure they got all this stuff done over the summer. It tends to be a stronger pool. It's a little bit more competitive, because you're dealing with all these type a kids who have got all of their stuff together, or perhaps their parents have helped them a tremendous amount, or they've hired a private admissions counselor, or they have some other kind of assistance that allows them to feel confident and to navigate, you know, EA versus ED versus ED two versus SCE, all of these policies that we're talking about here. It's a lot to make sense of and wrap your head around. So a lot of the people who are in these early rounds do have those sorts of advantages, and it ends up being a much more competitive pool. So that's kind of a mitigating factor to keep in mind. Just because the acceptance rate seems higher doesn't mean they're just opening the doors wider to anybody. It may be that they've got a self selecting pool of very, very strong candidates. At the same time, there are a lot of schools who like filling their class with early applicants for more reasons than just that's where we find the strongest applicants. Many schools are trying to shift the workload since covid Certainly, but even since the common app has gone digital, colleges, a lot of colleges, not all colleges, are dealing with just huge increases in the number of applications that they're getting, and they have to hire outside readers, and it's just a lot to manage, and so trying to spread that out a little bit, getting some applications in earlier, and then, you know, the rest at regular decision gives them a little bit more breathing room to really make the decisions they want. So that's part of it, another part of it. And, you know, you could be as cynical as you want to about this, but I'll try to stick to the facts. Students who apply early tend to be wealthier for, you know, all of the reasons I was talking about those advantages, those tend to go with, you know, with wealth, when you can afford it, there's a lot of research that shows wealth is an enormous advantage in the process. And this is, this is one of those places. So students who are applying early, maybe those full pay students that colleges are sort of always looking for, even though we can talk about this in another episode, they're often given those full pay students large discounts that they don't even need. Okay, so that's that's early action. So the other main type of application is what we call early decision same deadlines, November, 1 or 15th, depending on the school. But the main difference is that early decision applications are binding, meaning, if you get in to your early decision school you have to go. And there are some ways out of that early decision agreement that the student, the parent and the college counselor has to sign off on. And usually those revolve around, you know, proving you're not able to afford to go to that school given whatever financial aid they may have offered you, or involving a lawyer. So that one is when you really need to think very carefully about we recommend you only do early decision to a school that your student is really confident they want to go there. Of course, it's impossible to be 100% sure about anything, but they should really want to go there above any of the other. Schools, and you should have some sense that you can afford it. You know, given the variable of financial aid that's involved here, and because it's binding, early decision can only be done at one college, and the admissions rates are higher for early decision, and part of that is for all the reasons we discussed that early action is is higher, but because early decision is binding, it's even higher. One of the things that a lot of colleges are struggling with these days is something called yield, and yield is the percentage of students that accept a college's offer of admission. So let's say I'm a college I admit 100 students, and only 40 of them decide to enroll, I have a 40% yield. And so your most selective colleges, the ones that everybody's always tripping over themselves about, have quite high yields. But even even those colleges have seen their yields decline in the last few years because students are hedging their bets. They're applying to so many more colleges, it can be quite hard to predict who's going to enroll and who's not. And you could talk to someone who's really an expert in this field of Enrollment Management about the sophisticated models that they build to understand the likelihood of a student attending and managing kind of the outflow of information from that because, you know, you should keep in mind that the number of students that enroll really has a huge impact on a college's operating budget and all of the logistics right. How many beds do we need in our dorms? How many teachers do we need? Do we have enough classroom space? Do we have, you know, the right amount of mental health or social supports for this number of students, and it's fairly constraining, but, you know, they can't really go over their limits, but they want to get as close to as possible without going over. So it's a little bit of the prices right here. So early decision does have higher acceptance rates because they know those students are coming, there's less risk of admitting somebody in early decision and not harming your yield. And so we do see a lot of private colleges and particularly lean on early decision using early decision to fill close to half of their class, or some colleges fill more than half of their class with early decision students to take that risk out. So the only variation on early decision is early decision two, which is the early application that doesn't go in earlier than any regular decision application. So there are a few schools, not nearly as many, as offer early decision or early action, but there are a few schools that offer something they call early decision two. It's a second round of early decision and this is for students who have heard back from their early decision one, or maybe they weren't ready to send an application in the beginning of November for an early decision one, but they would like to express that binding commitment to a school and take advantage of, you know, the the higher acceptance rates in an early application round, but these are due the same date as regular decisions. That's usually like January 1, maybe January 5. Sometimes you see january 15, and you do hear back earlier than March. Usually it's in early February. You'll hear back from an ED two, and it is binding. So if you get in, you gotta go. And this is an interesting one. I have a lot of families who are like, Okay, we need to know all of our EAs and our EDs and our ED two before we even start writing anything. And I always encourage them, No, we're just going to take this phase by phase. And once you've kind of figured out your early actions, your early decision your possible ED twos. You want to calibrate your work to those phases, right? So in the summer between junior and senior year, and in the early fall of senior year, you really want to focus all of your attention on getting those early action, early decision applications done. But once they're off your desk, you can't just stop and wait for the results, because you're probably going to apply to some regular decision schools, maybe an ED two school. You need to make sure those materials are moving forward so that if you get not the result that you were hoping for, if you get rejected or if you get deferred from your early applications, you're not starting from scratch when you're in this sort of emotionally hurt place where you're dealing with you know the reality check of the stream school is out of reach. So I encourage my students after November 1 to take a little bit of a breather, maybe seven to 10 days, but then return to working on regular decision applications and getting those materials to about 60 to 70% of the way done. And you know, if they've done their common application, they're just going to reuse that material. Maybe there's some tweaks that they want to put in, but that's basically done. It's really about working on the supplemental essays for the regular decision schools and a lot. Of the times those supplemental essays do overlap in terms of topic, right? Lots of schools ask about what are your academic interests, or what's your most meaningful extracurricular, or tell me something about your lived experience and how it's shaped you as a person. Of course, these essays all need to be tailored to each specific school, but the core answer for any school will probably be very similar. So you can repurpose some material from your early applications to get your regular decisions done, and you want to move them along at least do the research to know what you're going to say and do some of the planning to know how you're going to finish those essays before you get any early decision or early action results back so that you're not scrambling over your winter break to get things done, or you're not having to kind of push aside your feelings and compartmentalize them so that you can get them done, that you actually have time to process right because you you won't be starting from scratch with these other schools. So that's my best advice. You do all of the early actions that you can, barring the specifics of their policies. You choose one ED if a school rises to that level of interest and optimal fit, including financial fit for the family, and then you have a few ED twos waiting in the background, in case you need to move forward with one of those, because you're not getting the result you were hoping for from your first ED school. So it's worth talking about what kind of results you get back from an early application, because it's not just you get in or you don't get in. There's actually a third option, which is called a deferral. And basically what happens is they say, well, we liked what we saw here. We kind of want to see how our regular pool shapes up, and we are going to pretend that you just applied regular decision. We're going to reconsider your application with the rest of our regular decision applications. And students who are deferred are usually encouraged to send some sort of letter or an update that can bring their application up to speed with anything that might have happened between November 1, when they submitted that early application, and whatever the regular deadline is going to be, whether that's January 1 or 15th. So I think that letter is very important. It's very important to follow the instructions of the college on this, because sometimes they say, you know, give us 200 words. They might say, only give us this kind of information. Don't send anything else. So it's really important to follow their instructions on that. But when a student is able to send in some additional materials or a letter, I strongly encourage them to do so. We call it a letter of continued interest, but that letter should include any real updates, right, like if there any awards or accomplishments that weren't reported on the original application or realizations of why else this college is such a great fit for you? Maybe you've met somebody you know, a student or a professor or somebody affiliated with university that told you something you didn't know, and it really resonated with you about you know in terms of what your interests were or what you are hoping for in your college experience, or perhaps you took a class that opened your eyes to some subfield of the original field you were interested in, and now your interests have gotten a little bit more clear and a little bit more narrow, or you've changed your mind completely. I'm no longer interested in studying literature. I really want to do psychology, or who knows what it is, but with sound reasoning that really does express why this school is the best fit for you. So we went through the definitions, we went through kind of how to put this puzzle together. But I feel like it's helpful, if I share with you some of the pros and cons of early applications, right? So some of the benefits is that your student will be motivated to get it over with. You're not dragging this whole process out through the winter of their senior year. They've got to work ahead in order to have quality applications in time for those early deadlines. So they're going to start working ahead. I mean, in theory, they're going to have to start working ahead of time to make sure that everything is where it needs to be, so you get it over with sooner, and you can focus on other things. You can show colleges that you're deeply invested in them, organized, prepared, and that's going to help your admissions chances. And you know, you get to take advantage of those better acceptance rate for the many reasons they may be higher, of course, dig into those to make sure they're higher for a reason that would actually benefit you. But some of the cons of early applications is the fact that they're due early. Not everybody has their materials together. It might not be about the essays. It might be the test scores. Maybe you don't have the test score that you think you want to submit with your application by November 1 in. Which case you'll have to delay to a regular decision. You might not have the grades that you want to show just yet, and you want to use strong senior fall grades to counteract something else in your transcript. Or you may have to rush those essays, and they're not written to the best of your ability by November 1, and you need a little more time to think deeply and revise your materials. Also you have a stronger applicant pool in the early round, so you are going to have tougher competition. And if you are worried, you're not going to stand out in that competition, it may be worth your while to delay to the regular round, though, of course, this is very nuanced and different by school, so you're really going to want to look into that and see where things are actually going to benefit you to delay. So some questions that you can reflect on to see if you should apply early. The first one is, have you come to a well informed decision about your fit at this college? I cannot stress how important that is. That's a really great question to ask, even if you're just wondering, should I apply to this college or not? Have you come to a well informed decision about your fit at this college, and then, is everything done and excellent? Your common application, your supplemental essays, your main essay, your recommendations, your testing, your grades? Are they where they need to be for you to demonstrate your fit with this college if they're not, then you might want to think about regular decision and actually putting your best foot forward in your application. Because let's not forget, you can get rejected from an early application, right? There are three options, you get in, you don't get in, or you get deferred. So if you submit an early application that is not your best work, is not representative of your true abilities and values, and all of those things that a college is going to be evaluating, you might get rejected, and then you've lost your chance with that school altogether. Whereas if you take a little bit more time to demonstrate all of those elements of fit, then you may actually have a better chance in regular decision. So I'll tell you. It all comes back to the school list, and you got to spend your time there to make sure that you are thinking critically and intentionally about what schools make it on your list and what kind of priority you want to assign to the different schools. There are kind of two camps with early decision. One is, don't use it for an IV because the admissions rates are so small, but use it for a slightly less selective college where you know that there is actually going to be a significant bump in the acceptance rate from using the early decision option, and that way, you're sort of locked in at a school that you really like, and you're done with this process. You know you might not have to apply to many other schools. The other camp is use your ED at the most selective school you're applying to, because it's your best chance if any of you out there working with seniors who are really having trouble deciding, oftentimes, just phrasing the question to them in a different way can be very helpful, and that phrasing would be something like if you could get in anywhere. Let's say you had acceptances from these three schools you're deciding between for your ED, where would you go, and why? The why is so important, even posing a okay? So a lot of the times when kids are hung up on where to ED or whether to ED, a lot of the times they are not hung up on their own potential regrets, like they may be perfectly happy ED into a slightly less selective school where everybody thinks, like, Okay, this feels like a really good fit, and we feel good about your ED chances here, versus using that ED at school with a 4% acceptance rate, usually they're not worried that they're going to regret something. They're worried about their parents. Feelings about this? We know parents, we want the best for our kids, but that word best takes on a whole new sort of monstrous meaning when it comes to college admissions. So what are we really trying to do here. So the question really is, here, are you a satisficer or an optimizer? So some people say Maximizer rather than optimizer. And I think the main difference is this, that Satisficers have a set of parameters that they are looking to meet before making their ultimate choice, they know what those parameters are, and then they choose the thing that fits their parameters, whereas a maximizer or an optimizer is just deciding I got to do the best, because that's actually going to make me the happiest, which is not always true, I think you can kind of tell where I stand. On this like I am, I encourage my students and families to be satisfiers. The idea of good enough almost sounds like you are settling for something. So I don't like that phrasing. But really, if we found a school that checks all your boxes, why not Edie there? Even if you think, oh, maybe, if I applied to this ivy, maybe I have a shot, right? If that quote, unquote, more reputable school or better brand name school, maybe doesn't check all your boxes in all the same ways, but has that prestige that is so distracting, right? This is very personal decision, but in a process that creates so much stress and anxiety for families, taking this satisficing approach can actually reduce that stress and help everybody be on the same page about what we're looking for. So I hope that that is helpful to you. There is a lot to navigate here, and I every time I explain this to somebody, I reflect on just how much we are asking of our teenagers and their families. A college counselor doesn't matter what size load they have. A college counselor is not equipped to do this kind of deep, strategic thinking with every single student they're responsible for, and this is a problem that is completely manufactured by the way this college process works. And I know we can do better, and I hope we will start to do better by our families and our kids, because, oh boy, you are seeing the effects of this trickle down into really, really young ages, and we're talking about the anxiety and stress that comes in a college going culture. There's so many people who are left out of that culture or being forced into that culture, and they don't need to be. And I'm getting a little bit on my soapbox here, but there are so many students who think college is not for them because of things like this, because they have to find a way to educate themselves about the ins and outs of all of these policies and figure out how to work it all together. It's overwhelming. And this is not even the application. This is choosing where to apply. So, you know, we're leaving so many people out of this process because of the way that it's structured. And I think it's, it's, it's just extremely unfair and inefficient. And we got to take a deep, hard look at ourselves and say, what do we actually want out of our society? And do we want more people to have access to education? And this is a place where we can start making things simpler and making things easier for them, and not just providing advantages to the wealthy. So I'm gonna get off my soapbox, but that's what I really think, friends, if you disagree with me, I want to hear from you. If you agree with me, I also want to hear from you. Next week, I am going to be at a conference with the National Association for College Admissions Counseling National Conference, which is going to be here in LA next week, and really excited to see a lot of old friends and meet some new people. And I might be toting around a microphone to catch some sound bites, and maybe we'll assemble them into an episode, but this is a great conference where a lot of that thinking can happen and a lot of action and information can be shared around what we can do to make things better for families and kids and future generations. So I'm excited to be there, but because I will be there, it means we will not have a podcast episode next week, so I will see you in October. Thanks for listening as always, and we'll catch you next time bye.