Planning: Early Decision NOT always an Easy Decision

Sanjeev Maddila, PhD

Deciding which college to attend is one of the biggest decisions we (or our parents) make in our lives. It is especially hard for the 17-yr old teenager brain especially if they try to consider the possibility that this choice could possibly impact the rest of their lives. For these same reasons, we parents constantly fret about how our kids are coming along with their college apps. These days that's all we seem to talk about at our house.

As if it wasn't hard enough to choose among thousands of colleges based on multiple criteria (like the fees/budget, location, areas of study, reputation, admissibility etc.) we also need to choose when to apply to those colleges. Some of the more selective ones offer the option of applying Early (by Nov 1) in addition to regular deadline of Dec 31st

However, there is a slight twist to these Early applications - Early Action or Admit (EA) vs. Early Decision (ED). If you apply early decision, you sign a binding contract agreeing to enroll if you're accepted. Because of this binding agreement to enroll, you can only apply to one school ED. (Single choice Early Action, is like EA but you can apply only to one college)

Some of the popular and top schools like Brown, Boston U, CMU, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, NYU, Tufts, and U Penn ... offer higher rates of acceptance to their ED applicants which account for 40-60% of the incoming class of undergraduates. According to Washington Post "At 37 schools the early-decision share of enrolled freshmen in 2015 was at least 40 percent."

Despite the inherent advantage of higher acceptance rates for ED, the decision is not so easy. In my analysis of the 2015 ED data of 64 schools (from Washington Post article) I see two distinct groups, ones where there is a significant advantage, while the other with not so clear advantage.

Let me illustrate my analysis (using applications data from 2015 Common Data Set) for two of the popular highly selective schools.Complete List of Early Decision Schools

Both Cornell and NYU picked about 40% of their incoming class from ED applicants who were 11% and 15% of the total applicants respectively. Acceptance rates of ED applicants was 26% at Cornell and 29% at NYU, which means acceptance rates for regular decision (RD) were 14% at Cornell and 34% for NYU.

Assuming all other things equal between ED and RD (a big assumption), you were twice as likely to get accepted into Cornell if you applied ED (26%) vs RD (14%), while you would have been better off applying RD (34%) at NYU instead of ED (29%), while keeping open all your options. Above chart shows % improvements in Acceptance rates expected for Early Decision over Regular Decision.

So think carefully before you apply - Early decision is NOT always the best decision.