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Founded by Michael J. Youmans, Ph.D. (aka “Dr. Yo”)—creator of CommonApp Boot Camps and author of The CommonApp Handbook—with degrees from Harvard, Middlebury/Oxford, and Boston College School of Ed, CollegePrepExpress provides individualized, comprehensive strategies for playing today’s ultra competitive college admissions game to WIN!
Early is the New Regular: Why “Early and Excellent” is the ONLY Winning Strategy in Today’s College Admissions
WARNING If you’re applying to selective colleges in the next couple of years and not planning to take advantage of Early Application Programs—ED (Early Decision), EA (Early Action), REA (Restrictive Early Action), EDII, and EAII—STOP! Do not pass go! You won’t be collecting $200 or very many acceptance letters that way. There is only one truly savvy application strategy today: Early and Excellent. Numbers don’t lie, and the data clearly show a HUGE advantage to applying to top, second-tier, and third-tier colleges EARLY, typically two months before a school’s Regular Application deadline. They also show that many savvy applicants are catching on, with 65% of all applicants in the 2025-26 cycle submitting at least one application in an early round. Applying in the early round (EA, ED, READ) is no longer a proactive choice—it has become the baseline. I won’t sugar coat my message: College application writing is heavy lifting, so all applicants today have to sit down at some point until beads of blood form on their forehead. It’s a rite of passage for today’s college-bound teens. The vast majority do it the summer before or during the fall of senior year. While the timing changes (summer vs. fall), the workload—the heavy lifting, the beads of blood—remains the same. The only variables are the psychic space created by the time and place in which to write… and the Admissions Rate. KEY TAKEAWAY If you wait until the Regular Decision (RD) deadlines in January, you are essentially competing for the leftovers. Many selective colleges now fill 70% or more of their total freshman seats before the RD round even opens. The bottom line is the data clearly show a multi-tiered advantage for early applicants. While the statistical gap is most dramatic at the most selective schools, the nature of the advantage changes as you move toward national averages. MOST SELECTIVE (IVY PLUS SCHOOLS) These schools (Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Duke, UChicago, NYU) use Early Decision or Restrictive Early Action to lock in their “yield”—the percentage of admitted students who enroll. This is the most attractive application program, especially from the perspective of the colleges, as they know for sure if they accept you, you will attend. That’s huge to them. And therefore to you, too. CategoryEarly Acceptance RateRegular Acceptance RateThe “Multiplier” (Advantage)Ivy League (Avg)~12– 15%~3% – 5%3xBrown University~ 14.4%~ 2.7%5.3xDartmouth~17% (Est.)~3% (Est.)5.6xDuke University12.9%~4.1%3.1xYale 10.8%~3.5%3.0x Key Insight: These schools often fill 50% or more of their incoming freshman class before the Regular Decision (RD) round even begins. For example, Brown and UPenn consistently fill over 50% of their seats through ED. The “Locked-In” Strategy: The early advantage is massive because you are competing for 50% of the seats against only 15-20% of the total applicant pool. HIGHLY SELECTIVE (Top 50 / Large Research & Liberal Arts) This category includes schools like Emory, UVA, Vanderbilt, and high-end Liberal Arts Colleges (LACs) like Bates or Colby. This is where the ED advantage is often the most aggressive. CategoryEarly Acceptance RateRegular Acceptance RateThe “Multiplier” (Advantage)Vanderbilt15.4%5.9%2.6xEmory23.0% – 30.0%~10%2.5xTulane~59%~13%4.5xBates College27.1%13.3%2.0xUVA (Out-of-State)18.5%~12%1.5x Key Insight: Many schools in this tier use ED II (a second binding round in January). This allows them to “scoop up” highly qualified students who were deferred or rejected from Ivy Plus schools, offering a second chance at a statistical edge. Trend: Public universities (like UVA or Georgia Tech) are seeing massive spikes in Early Action (EA) volume, which is actually lowering their early acceptance rates compared to previous years NATIONAL AVERAGE (Broadly Selective & State Schools) At the national level, the early application program advantage begins to evaporate or shift toward Rolling Admissions. At big state schools (Rolling/EA) like Penn State, Michigan State, or Arizona State, applying early is less about a lower bar and more about priority for housing and scholarships. CategoryTypical Accept RateEarly Advantage?National Avg~72.6% (per NACAC data)Marginal (3-5% difference)Large State School60% – 85%Priority for majors/fundingRolling Admissions SchoolsVariableFirst-come, first-served The National Reality: For the average US college, “Early” is a logistical preference rather than a competitive necessity. Other important and little known factors include the following: Test-Optional is Becoming Test-Preferred While many schools remain officially Test-Optional, the data reveal a hidden advantage for those who submit scores, especially in the early rounds. The Gap: At schools like Emory and Boston College, students who submitted test scores in the 2025 cycle were admitted at nearly double the rate of non-submitters (e.g., 17% with scores vs. 8.6% without). If at all possible, submit an SAT or ACT score. In a sea of straight-As and challenging classes, a strong SAT/ACT score acts as a validator that schools are increasingly rewarding during the fast-paced early review process. The ED II and EA II Strategic Pivot If a student is deferred or rejected from their top choice schools December, the ED II and EA II round (typically due in January) serve as the ultimate safety net. Why it works: Colleges use ED II /EA II to scoop up high-caliber “free agents” who are now desperate for a sure thing. The Strategy: ED II offers the same binding commitment as ED I but allows the student to see their first-round results before committing. It’s the rebound that can actually land you at a Top 30 school. Financial Aid Pro-Tip: While ED increases admission odds, it limits the ability to compare financial aid packages. For families where the cost of college is a major deciding factor, Early Action (EA) is the superior strategic choice because it provides the early answer without the legal obligation to enroll regardless of the cost. There Is a Solution: Dr. Yo’s CommonApp Boot Camps The fastest track to both EARLY & EXCELLENT is Dr. Yo’s 5-day summertime CommopnApp Boot Camps. Click for details. Get Early & Excellent Now! Notes: The Rise of “Public Ivies” in the South There has been a massive geographic shift. Schools like UGA, Clemson, UT Austin, and Georgia Tech are seeing record-breaking Early Action volume, often from Northeast and West Coast candidates. Early Action applications to the University of Georgia, for example, have surged by over 40% in the last few years. Because of this “Southern Surge,” EA acceptance rates at these top-tier publics are plummeting, making them just as hard to crack as some Ivy League schools for out-of-state students. Sources: Many top schools (Harvard, Princeton, Stanford) have stopped releasing real-time data for the early round to “reduce stress,” so statistics for those schools are often based on the previous year’s Common Data Set or official university press releases. Sources for this post: Fortuna Admissions, “Ivy League Early Decision Acceptance Rates: What You Need to Know RISE Research, “Colleges with the Highest Early Acceptance Rates” Empowerly, “Early vs. Regular Decision Acceptance Rates: 2025 Comparison Applerouth, “8 Predictions for College Admissions in 2026” College Board Counselor Workshops, “Early Decision and Early Action” Applerouth, “Test Optional Colleges 2026: What the Class of 2030 Early Data Really Show”
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REFERENCES To email or talk to former students and parents about CollegePrepExpress, LLC, email or call/text (413) 329-7540 for contact info. We’re happy to connect you with past families — just reach out! MORE RESULTS —>
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Becoming a Vocab Sponge: Learning Digital SAT Vocab Quickly and Effectively
In the biggest SAT redesign of the 21st century back in 2016, the CollegeBoard did away with “Vocabulary” questions, replacing them with much fluffier “words in context” items. Instead of having to memorize the definitions of words like perfunctory, intractable, and circumlocution, students could use contextual clues to determine which of four much easier words fit in a given context. Quite surreptitiously (to use a favorite old school College Board word), they’re been slowly bringing back more and more of their favorite words that used to appear on the SAT for decades. So the bad news is that it’s no longer accurate to say “there isn’t any vocab on the digital SAT.” But the good news is, from someone who’s seen every question on every official digital SAT available on the Blue Book app, the test writers are using the very same word bank they’ve been using since the last millennium. Wouldn’t it be great if we all knew what those most commonly appearing words on the SAT were? Hey, guess what? We do 😉 For starters, see the slides above! The sticking point for most students isn’t lack of access to the set of vocab words that appear over and over again on the SAT but rather an approach to studying them such that they’ll stick. If you’re like most students, you probably have little trouble memorizing vocab words for quizzes and tests. The night before the quiz—be honest, sometimes the period before—you cram the words into your brain and you do just fine. But three days later, they’ve all somehow vanished from your memory, leaving you with that uncomfortable feeling the next time you encounter one of them (say, on the SAT) that you should know the word but alas, you don’t. D’oh! So the question is, how do you learn words and NOT forget them? Fortunately, there are several good tricks to this trade. First, while you’re in training for standardized tests and acing high school in general, become a vocab sponge. Look up and write down (or word process) any word you encounter that you do not know. Make it a matter of pride: NOBODY uses words you don’t know, and when someone does, it gets to you and you won’t let it happen again. 😉 If you want to work out of a great vocab book, the best high school/SAT prep book on the market is Princeton Review’s Word Smart. One of the oldest and most reliable pedagogical technique is repetition (do you know the word pedagogical/pedagogy? If not, write it down!). Reviewing a little bit every day is THE KEY to long-term retention. That is, rather than cramming for an hour once in a blue moon, you review your word list for just a few minutes once or twice a day. Whether you use flash cards or simple vocab lists, another key is to group them not alphabetically (as most books do), but by synonyms. You know how your brain works: sometimes you remember exactly where on the page you read something (e.g., the lower left-hand side) or which words are above and below the word on some list you’re trying to remember. So if the words above and below the word you’re trying to remember all mean roughly the same thing, you’re golden! CPE students know that’s the fastest way to learn vocab is with SYNONYM CLUSTERS!
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Working with your HS Guidance Counselor: Creating a Foundation to Maximize Admissions to College
by Dr. Yo, with contributions from Anthony Faulise For better or worse, college counselors play a significant role in every U.S. high school student’s journey to college, influencing many aspects of the entire application process, from the selection of schools to admissions committees’ final decisions. College counselors have substantial administrative responsibilities both for their school’s particular guidance program and for each of their individual students’ applications, including coordinating letters of recommendation, sending official high school transcripts and mid-year reports, arranging information sessions with regional directors and other college representatives, helping to run college nights and other counseling events, and, in some cases, a lot more. But even more important to success of applications is that they often communicate directly with admissions officers, and they always write the Counselor Letter of Recommendation that serves as a kind of cover letter for every student’s entire application. In other words, they typically make the first impression on admissions officers about each applicant’s candidacy, and, of course, first impressions are lasting impressions. Ultimately your individual talents, interests, college preparedness, and likelihood of making some kind of contribution must score the touchdown, but in many respects college counselors are the quarterbacks who can make plays to get you the ball. Nationwide, relationships between applicants and high school college counselors vary considerably from region to region, state to state, and school to school. At the luck end of the spectrum, counselors know their students as well as their parents do—perhaps because they served as dorm parents for a year or more, as academic advisors, teachers, coaches, or extracurricular instructors who guided them through a significant chunk of high school, or some combination of these. At the unlucky end, counselors are faceless administrators, whom students meet for the first time when they sit down to develop their college lists. While relationships between students and counselors come in every gradation between these two extremes, the national student-to-counselor ratio—somewhere between 300:1 and 500:1—strongly suggests that most counselors simply don’t have the bandwidth to give each student the time and attention necessary to know them well enough to create outstanding applications. Some data in 2023 suggests a slow trend toward smaller numbers, but even the most optimistic numbers peg the ration above 400:1 (see, for example, New data shows fewer students per counselor at nation’s schools, but caseloads remain high). It’s often hard to get your quarterback’s attention and focused interest when you’re competing with hundreds (or frankly, even dozens) of other players screaming for the ball. we advise all college applicants to make it their responsibility to make sure their counselors know them well enough to serve as an effective advocate for them throughout the process. At CPE, we advise all our applicants to make it their responsibility to make sure their counselors know them well enough to serve as an effective advocate for them throughout the process. Nevertheless, having a good working relationship with their counselor—their quarterback—is paramount to every applicant who wants to maximize his or her chances of acceptance to college. And a good working relationship in this case stems from the counselor’s specific knowledge of the applicant, both the most salient features of a high school career and particular dreams and goals for college… even if that counselor has 500 such applicants. Consequently, regardless of how well a college counselor may or may not know a student, we advise all college applicants to make it their responsibility to make sure their counselors know them well enough to serve as an effective advocate for them throughout the process. Your counselor may be the quarterback, but ultimately either YOU score the touchdown or YOU do not. And this is where being prepared with written summaries of the highlights of your high school career to date and your academic and personal goals for college for your first big sit-down with your counselor (and sometimes parents) go a long way toward helping you get in. In other words, given the hundreds of students typically assigned to a U.S. college counselor, the responsibility falls to the applicant to help their counselors know enough details about them through a clearly articulated assessment of their greatest strengths as college candidates—wherever they may lie. And if the overworked counselor is getting their information from you, the student, then you can help control the narrative. And if the overworked counselor is getting their information from you, the student, then you can help control the narrative. The cues you write for your counselor and how you write them may play a stronger role than the counselor’s own observations, especially if they are overloaded or sidelined in the post COVID-19 era. When you write your reminders to the counselor, write them in the way you would like the counselor to write them for your colleges—their limited time for each indicia advisee may necessitate their having simply to copy-and-paste from you. You can’t just invent an award you didn’t actually earn (#CollegeAdmissionScandal), but you can heighten the impact of a passion you want to convey. Although these written summaries, if done well, will be as unique to each applicant as a thumbprint or a photograph, they will generally cover three major areas of a high schooler’s life: Academics, supporting standardized tests, intellectual pursuits outside the classroom, and academic accolades Extracurricular activities, including athletics, club affiliations and leadership, community service, important holiday and summer experiences, and hobbies/passions Hopes, dreams, goals, and likely area(s) of study as an undergraduate How NOT to Do It The two most common mistakes students make when they first attempt such a self-assessment is that they’ll write too little or too much. For example, in summarizing their academic careers, some students will offer their cumulative GPA and maybe a sentence about their favorite subject. That much can be gleaned from even a cursory glance at their transcript, so it’s not much help to the counselor. Likewise, they might summarize their extracurriculars by noting they played a Varsity sport and listing all the clubs and organizations in which they participated since ninth grade. But they fail to connect their activities to each other, to their academic or professional interests and accomplishments, or to their aspirations for college. That’s too little. Conversely, some students will write a book about every class every year, or how they bounced between fall sports for three years before finally deciding to weight train senior year, and an array of other discrete narratives of all their other extracurricular activities, often losing the counselor in a sea of disconnected minutia. That’s too much. The best summaries take a lesson from Goldilocks: they’re not too short and uncommunicative, they’re not too long and discursive, but just right—with enough details to support a few, key, memorable points that highlight their strengths and make the best case for college acceptance. Writing up these summaries of academics, activities, and plans for college sounds simple and straightforward enough, but it is not an easy assignment for a high school junior or senior during the application process. Ironically, less than a year later, they will be much better equipped to do a thoughtful, thorough, and compelling job as a direct result of writing their applications. The CommonApp, and every other college application I’ve ever seen, asks students to put in writing answers to questions that create an overview of their academic records, their extracurricular pursuits, and what they hope to accomplish in and out of the classrooms at college. When they see their answers to all the application questions laid out in front of them, they start to notice, alas many times in hindsight, patterns in their academic, intellectual, and personal interests that will drive their college pursuits, and how their personal values and convictions are woven into their daily activities and allocation of time. But in the college admissions game, as in life, foresight leads to far greater success than hindsight. It’s a tall order, then, for teenagers to write cogent summaries of their high school careers as one of the first steps in the process. But those who rise to the challenge and do a thorough job are rewarded thrice over in the college admissions game: they ensure their college counselors know the major chapters of their overall story and how they have paved the way to their college dreams, thereby positioning them to be of maximum service in helping them get in; they place themselves in a much better position to write cohesive and ultimately successful college applications when the time comes; they position themselves to hit the ground running upon arrival to college campus, which is good for them, and nice for their parents, who typically spend a bajillion dollars to send them there. To ease the burden, students shouldn’t be afraid to ask their parents or other trusted adults who know them well for assistance. And the hard truth is that, even with help, most high school juniors and fall semester seniors lack the knowledge and experience of how to draw from the full range and subtleties of their entire high school careers as well as enough perspective to see it clearly while it’s actually still ...
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