You are making a bunch of incorrect assumptions.
1. Assumption #1 is the wrong overall rate. Last year Princeton had an overall rate of 4.7%. This year all early indicators point that there will be the same or softening in the rate so Princeton is going to be between 4.7%-5.0%. So while 12% is better than 5%, it simply means you have an 88% chance of not getting in.
2. Assumption #2 is the wrong SCREA acceptance rate. First of all Princeton's SCREA acceptance rate was not 14.7% in 2022. That number is for the Class of 2022 which is 5 years ago. For the Class of 2027 (decision date December 2022), Princeton is deliberately withholding acceptance data as they did for the Class of 2026 as well. For the Class of 2025, they suspended SCREA so there was no Early Action when people applied in the fall of 2020. However, based on Harvard's 7.57%, Yale's 10.02%, and Columbia's 11.33%, it's fair to say that had Princeton published a rate it would be around 10% this cycle.
3. Assumption #3 is that your CollegeVine chancing rate can be used in the manner you suggest. It can not. There is a drop-down selection choice on your "my college list" where you can toggle between "Early", "Regular" and "Transfer" rates. For example, my RD rate at Princeton is 42% but my REA rate and transfer rate is also 42%. So at Princeton, CV thinks the applicant pool is so competitive during SCREA and transfer admissions, that my profile wouldn't get a bump. However, at Brown and Columbia, my RD rates of 33% and 34% go up to 46% and 47%, because they are ED schools versus EA schools. Why? Because I'm giving up the opportunity cost of applying to other schools so I get the benefit of applying early to a school that I'm ready to commit to and forgo the other choices.
The biggest misconception for 99% of high school seniors is to think that you get some automatic multiplier for applying early to Top Colleges. This is absolutely incorrect.
Let me break it down for you. EA and ED cycles have 5 basic applicant pools:
1. ALDCs - Recruited athletes, Legacies, Development candidates (children of donors), and Children of Faculty and Admin. Also within this pool are 2 other groups, VIPs (celebrities) and Dean List (special consideration applicants earmarked by the Dean of Admissions. These can add up to 45% of the acceptance pool.
2. Other hooked applicants. These can be Black, LatinA, Indigenous, or marginalized folk who are low-income, first-generation, or come from any under-represented minority. Often these students apply through Questbridge, Posse, and other community service organizations. They can add up to 10% of the Ivy acceptance pool.
3. The cream of the crop who are the very best students who either want to get into their #1 college of choice or FLEX as much as they can by applying Early Action. So typically the cream of the crop is going to pick a bet like applying EA to MIT, Princeton, Yale, Harvard, or Stanford. The next strongest pool is going to apply ED to UPenn, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, UChicago, Rice, JHU, and so forth. These can add up to 35% of the acceptance pool.
4. Excellent qualified students with amazing stats and ECs, essays, and recommendations. Very few of these students get into this round, about 10%
5. The "hail Mary" shoot the basketball from the half-court line applicants that are not strongest but feel that they are going to shoot their shot. Most of these will get flat-out rejected.
So in reality, unless you are a hooked applicant like an ALDC or otherwise or a top-seeded applicant, the SCREA or ED rate for your pool might be no better than applying Regular Decision, to begin with. The logic for the schools is this. They want to cherry-pick the very best applicants in the early rounds and wait and see everyone else in the later rounds.
My analysis is meant only for Ivys. I think what is going on at USC, Tulane, and NorthEastern are anomalies and have more to do with the Hype culture and these schools manipulating their admissions practices. It's illogical for the EA rate at USC to be 6% when the overall rate is 11%.
