The main advantage of cropping in Adobe Camera Raw is workflow, not inherently better image quality.

Cropping in ACR is generally non-destructive: the RAW file itself stays unchanged, and the crop/settings are stored separately (commonly in metadata/XMP). That means you can revisit or change the crop later without losing the original image area.

By contrast, if you crop after opening/saving in the Elements editor, that edit is often destructive unless you save a separate version or use a non-destructive workflow. Once saved over, the cropped-out pixels may be gone.

A practical benefit of cropping earlier is that if you’re making a significant crop, you may avoid exporting a larger-than-needed TIFF or other intermediate file.

As for quality, simple cropping itself does not usually improve image quality just because it’s done in ACR. If rotation/transform is involved, different tools could use different algorithms, but the provided answers don’t show a clear quality advantage for one over the other.

So: crop in ACR if you want a safer, reversible RAW workflow; crop in Elements if it better fits your process and you’re managing versions carefully.