It’s that time of year again and our students are hearing decisions by the day! Five years ago, anyone applying in the early round could expect to learn all of their early application results before the holidays. Now, the timeline has shifted a bit due to increases in application volume. With so many more applicants, the admissions officers just don’t have time to finish reading applications as early as they could. Each year, more and more schools shift to release EA decisions later and later.

Fortunately, schools are still generally following the model of a pre-holiday ED release, and we had a LOT of ED applicants this year. While I have always been very pro-ED in terms of strategy, this year I was a bit more aggressive in pushing every single family to give serious consideration to the option (as long as it made sense from a financial perspective) because of the trends I observed last year.

We had a huge number of students accepted to their top choice schools ED with only one decision that I was really bummed about. We also had a couple of others deferred from schools that were gigantic, “Hail Mary” type reaches. This year was without a doubt our most successful yet.

Our last student waiting to hear back from ED learned her decision on Tuesday (another acceptance! yay!) and I would say about half of the early action students have received notification thus far. These will continue rolling in throughout the next couple of days. The rest of the early action news will come in January or February, and regular decision results will follow in late March.

As much as I’d love to go into a deeper analysis of 2019-2020 trends from the early round, I’m going to save that until I have a more complete picture after the rest of the EA news comes in this winter - and the ED II news as well!