Deciding Early on Early Decision

The job of college admissions is to accept enough applications from prospective students that the university will have an entire class cohort each and every year. Nothing frustrates admissions folks quite so much as losing a particularly well-qualified student to a competing university. Universities use “Early Decision” admittance to surface their best prospects and manage their risks when assembling their class.

Risk management is project management for grown-ups.
–Tom DeMarco & Tim Lister, Waltzing With Bears

TLDR:

1. If you have a obvious first-choice university that you are certain you will be willing to pay for and your application is done and polished on time (end of October!), then Early Decision may be right for you and can improve your likelihood of acceptance.
2. If your application is rough, your finances are questionable, or your decision criteria are fluid, then you should not pursue a binding Early Decision.

Early Decision is for Admissions.

Early Decision exists to benefit the university. Make no mistake about that. But, contrary to a hand-wringing lawsuit, some of those benefits are passed back to the students who are offered admission in exchange for their ready (usually by Halloween) and singularly-binding commitment to the university of their choice. 

Admissions departments are increasingly filling their cohort needs from the smaller, enthusiastically-committed Early Decision (or, less commonly, Early Action) applicant pools, leaving fewer seats in the cohort for the later, larger set of Regular Decision applicants. This usually means that early applicants will have a higher admit rate than what is published while later applicants will have a lower admit rate than what is published.

It also means that the elevated acceptance rates that many IECs brag about is just the result of sending in many qualified student’s polished application for Early Decision, no miracles needed.

Is Early Decision for you?

The answer is usually No but let’s walk through the process.

1. Have you have an Obvious Favorite university? You should be able to answer “Yes” to the following questions:
   • Have you visited your preferred university, confirmed that it has no dealbreaking red flags, and prioritizes funding for the departments and programs that align with your intellectual curiosity?
   • Are you both a good academic and cultural fit for your preferred university and have their staff confirmed this?
   • Have you visited enough other universities to know that your favorite is the best you’re going to find?
   • And you are satisfied with the current and projected near-future political climate around your preferred university?
2. Will your application actually be ready? Students routinely fail to be ready for Early Decision in any of three ways:
   • Their application simply is not done. They put it off until later throughout August but when September hits all of their Senior AP classes and club presidencies land on them like a ton of bricks. If you tell an IEC you want to do Early Decision, they will tell you to get your application together in August.
   • Their application is half-assed. Many students regard the college application as a type of homework merely to be done–especially on a short deadline. They produce applications that are somewhere between incoherent and actively cringe, falling far short of the self-reflective care needed to entice the admissions committee. If you work with an IEC, they will lead you through multiple revisions of your application, ensuring that it represents you as a worthy scholar and community member.
   • The application is incomplete. Most students are prepared to send their transcript, activities, essays, and sometimes even their FAFSA. But when the early application needs a school profile or letters of recommendation that are entirely dependent on several other people, the student’s ability to deliver is not what counts. Working with an IEC will help you plan ahead, minimizing risks early and helping you manage third-party processes to completion.
3. Are you fiscally willing and prepared to take what you’re offered? A university will offer the simplest financial aid package that meets their stated obligations to an early decision student. This is usually to improve their net cohort flexibility when addressing the regular decision cohort: it is risk management for their budget-balancing needs. They will try to offer you a good deal, but do not expect them to offer you a great deal.
   • Special: Some schools (ex: University of Puget Sound) evaluate their risks differently by pledging their need-meeting financial aid to their early decision acceptances and making no such promise about what budget may be left over for the regular-decision students. This risk management strategy indicates they have a harder time getting commitments from qualified students than providing them with an affordable education.

If you can say “Yes!” to those three things, then you can narrow the game from making odds across an entire table of colleges to aiming for a round of musical chairs at your favorite college—and that may tip the odds in your favor.

Stories of Previous Students

One of my best students ever was too hasty with her application to her absolute favorite university. Her personal statement was a heap of twee drivel about pancakes or somesuch. She was flatly rejected. After getting past the shock and sadness, she put together a proper application, was accepted by a different very prestigious school, and has since gone on to academic distinction and is pursuing a doctorate. Lesson: Rejection is not the end of the road, just a fork in your path.

Another excellent student I was working with was very keen on a particular university for very good reasons but needed major subsidies to study with them. They deferred him from their Early Decision pool down to the regular pool and then—when they established confidence in their fiscal ability to offer him the scholarships he needed—they admitted him in the regular admission cycle. Lesson: Deferral is not rejection, do not despair prematurely.

Gory Details for Math Nerds 🤓

Put simply: the acceptance rate for a school is not the same between an Early Decision pool and a Regular Decision pool. If the cohort is split 1:1 between those pools, but the Regular Decision applicants outnumber the Early Decision applicants 4:1 then you can see how the aggregate admission rate is going to be misleading, with far better odds for Early Decision applicants.

Using some simplified-but-realistic numbers from an actual elite university:

• Given a cohort of 600 students drawn from a total pool of 8100 applicants, we see that 7% of the applicants enroll at this university.
• The university reported an admittance rate of 14%. This means that their yield rate is 50% (0.07/0.14 = 0.5). Admissions wants a higher yield rate, always. But 14% of 8100 is (rounded to) 1150 acceptances generated throughout this process and we will keep track of that.
• Of the 8100 total applications, 900 (11%) were early and of those, 300 (33%) were accepted. That’s far better than the 14% aggregate admittance rate. 🥳
• If we oversimplify by saying that none of the 300 early acceptances back out and all the other early applicants were deferred, then we have 300 remaining seats in the cohort to fill with 850 (1150 total accepts – 300 early accepts) acceptances for 7800 (8100 total – 600 early + 300 deferred) applications.
• Those numbers mean that the Regular Decision acceptance rate drops to 11% (850/7800 = .11) from the aggregate 14% which is bad for applicants and the yield rate of acceptances to 35% (300 seats/850 accepts = .35) from the aggregate 50% which is bad for admissions. 😱

You can see from this example how getting enthusiastic students committed to a university early makes the great task of admissions easier (with a higher yield rate) and why they are happy to share the benefit with qualified students (as a higher acceptance rate).

Some more-precise, de-homogenized school-by-school analysis is available over from Super Tutor TV if you want gorier details.

That said: even those numbers are imprecise for schools with more and weirder application cycles, or with hard limits on popular programs like nursing or engineering, et cetera, and do not reflect any aura-farming shenanigans that universities (at least historically) engaged in to lower their admittance rate and boost their ranking.

While the big point here is that early application can increase your chance of admittance, the smaller point is that the statistics are barely even a historical guide and may not be relevant for your specific situation.