1) Yes date does play a role: you certainly arent going to get one before you submit
2) Schools get 5000+ applications and can process at maximum capacity 500 a week and with it just turning August, few schools are running anywhere near full capacity yet. The reason you should submit early isnt to get an early interview. It is make sure that your application gets looked at before Thanksgiving
3) Each school will have its own process, screen, evaluate and decide on II. They will certainly dynamically stratify, classify or rank applications as they come in and this becomes essentially your evaluation and/or interview priority. This would mean that as more applications came in that get ranked higher, you get pushed down lower in the queue. Indeed, your initial screen may dictate when you even get evaluated.
4) As example of the above, if you get "scored" 85/100 but they are only interviewing those who scored 92/100, it doesnt matter how early you submitted.
5) an individual school can get 5000+ applications but only has 1,000 interview slots, so 80% of application must be rejected pre-interview.
6) Overall, there are about 900,000+ individual applications for about roughly 150,000 interview slots. That means only about 15%-20% of applications get any action (ie II). If you applied to the average of 16 schools, that means you may get 2-3 II.
7) Additionally, just under half of matriculants get a single acceptance and just under half of them get a single interview
8) So overall roughly
100% apply
60% get rejected
10% get single interview/single acceptance
10% get multiple interview/single acceptance
20% get multiple interview/multiple acceptance
9) This cycle will continue for some for another YEAR as next August will be when the last WL people may get an acceptance
Chill
