Is It Worth It to Apply Early Decision to College?

Spoiler: the answer is probably yes, but it depends how you use it.

Many students and families hear that Early Decision, and to a lesser extent, Early Action, can give students “a boost” in terms of admissions chances at Ivy League or comparable schools.

On its face, this is not entirely unreasonable.

They see, for example, dramatic differences in acceptance rates between early rounds and regular rounds at a school like Harvard, where Restrictive Early Action has an 8.7% acceptance rate vs. 2.7% for regular.

The problem is, there is no significant “boost” happening here. The difference is that the pool of early decision applicants has a markedly different composition than the regular pool.

The pool of applicants in the early round consists of much greater proportions of:

-       Recruited athletes

-       Legacy & donor applicants

-       Students who are “paper perfect” or close to it

In contrast, the regular round has a much larger proportion of ‘why not’ applications or other students without the raw numbers to meaningfully compete.

Naturally, a much higher portion of those students in the first group are going to be admitted.

Now the good news.

First, this all works very differently at schools other than those at the tippy-top of rankings and prestige.

Second, you can absolutely use this to your advantage and get a boost at many excellent and even some quite prestigious schools by working strategically.

Let’s talk through how.

Why Do Colleges Offer Early Decision (ED)?

Just like the bond market, it’s all about yield.

One of the major factors in college rankings is their “yield”: the percentage of accepted students who enroll at the school.

The higher, the better. This shows that students consider the school highly desirable, since when choosing among multiple options, they’ve selected a given school above the others. For what it’s worth, this is why schools care about demonstrated interest! They’d rather not let students in unless those students are likely to attend.

Now think from a college’s perspective: if there were only a way to guarantee that an accepted student would attend, sigh…WAIT!

Early Decision achieves this goal for colleges. The more students they admit in the binding round, the higher their yield and the higher their rankings as a result.

What to Do

All this said, you can see how Early Decision can indeed make a modest difference in admission chances, and at some schools, it’s more pronounced than others.

It can’t be said enough that every situation is unique, but my baseline recommendation is that if you have your heart set on one of the super-prestige schools, it doesn’t hurt THAT much to take a shot applying early. However, it does cost you an opportunity to raise your chances through Early Decision at one of the many strong schools where it does help.

In the utterly insane admission environment that’s taken hold over the last couple years, maximizing chances at an excellent school a little further down the rankings may well be the best play rather than taking a swing at a Harvard, unless the name brand carries a lot of personal significance for you.

There’s a list of schools where ED can make a difference below, but if you want a quick way to check, look at whether they offer an Early Decision II round (typically due around the same time as most regular decision deadlines).

This signals that ED is a priority at the school, or that they’re at least looking to maximize their yield. (To be clear, this doesn’t mean you have to apply Early Decision II specifically, usually Early Decision I has a better boost).

An even better way to check is to look at the Common Data Set released by colleges each year. You can compare their ED admissions rates to the RD admissions rates. If the ED rate is more than 3.5 times as high as RD, it’s likely making a difference.

So, don’t expect ED to save you if you’re trying to get into a super-competitive school, but instead dig a little deeper into the many amazing schools out there, and see if you can find one where ED might actually give you a boost!

Best Schools for Early Decision

Schools Where ED Helps

Almost any liberal arts school

Barnard

Boston College

Boston University

Duke

Emory

Northeastern

Northwestern

NYU

Syracuse

Texas Christian University

Tufts

Tulane

University of Chicago

University of Miami

Vanderbilt

Wake Forest

Washington University in St. Louis

Ivies with ED

Brown

Columbia

Cornell

Dartmouth

Penn

(*Note that although these have fairly high ED to RD admissions ratios, they also have some of the most pronounced differences between the ED and RD applicant pools.)

Big J Educational Consulting put together this very helpful grid that includes ED and RD admission rates for a lot more schools.