Early Decision is a Racket
At first glance, Early Decision seems like a good deal that benefits students because it promises higher admissions chances. Upon closer inspection, it’s mostly bullshit. Many elite universities offer binding Early Decision deadlines that oblige students to enroll if offered admission. Early Decision (ED) differs from Early Action (EA) or Priority deadlines because students may only apply to a single ED school. In contrast, most universities permit students to apply to as many EA options as they wish. The first early admissions deadlines arose in the 1950s.
The 2003 book The Early Admissions Game: Joining the Elite found that applying ED confers a 100 point SAT advantage, which subsequent 2012 research by Antecol & Kiholm supports.
Students applying ED have a significant admissions advantage because universities admit ED students at two or three times the rate of applicants applying at the final deadline. Still, many ED applicants are deferred to the regular decision pool and receive their decision later on. If a student receives their ED admissions offer, usually sometime in late November through December, they’re supposed to withdraw all their other applications.
A common question I receive is whether ED is really binding. What happens if an admitted ED student chooses to break their agreement, especially if the family’s financial situation changes? Others may simply change their minds. The answer is a grey area and depends on the universities.
Legally, there is no recourse available to universities to coerce you into enrolling or paying any penalty. However, a university might “blacklist” a student or threaten to contact the student’s high school guidance counselor to prevent them from sending transcripts to other universities, although I have no idea whether or how many times this has happened in practice. Blacklisting seems like a vague threat necessary to maintain the myth of admissions omnipotence. Threats also reinforce cartel-like behavior that maximizes a university’s position at the expense of student well-being.
ED deadlines are the most obvious example in the application process of the asymmetry of power between universities and families. Universities leverage binding ED deadlines to entice students into putting all their eggs into a single basket. Initially, they were created to reduce stress for students who would find out their decision in the fall and could close their application process. Instead, it’s the most powerful tool in a university’s enrollment management arsenal. ED students guaranteed to arrive on campus help them forecast how many students they need to admit through regular deadlines.
Even at the highest echelon of the university hierarchy, only 75 percent of admitted Harvard students enroll. The Ivy League, Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT, U Chicago, and their equivalents compete for the same students. That’s one reason even Columbia or Chicago sends glossy, expensive recruitment brochures in your mailbox.
ED poaches students who might otherwise gain admissions and enroll at prestigious peer institutions. ED practices obscure a university’s overall admissions rate with the effect that many campuses are closed off to many regular decision applicants most of the time. That’s one reason I strongly caution against a “shotgun” approach of top-50 universities because many of them practice Early Decision. But ED practices encourage shotgun approaches because students know their chances at any given RD university are slim, so they’re incentivized to apply to many more universities.
Admission Statistics for Early Decision. Schools with an overall admit rate < 25 percent. 16 Universities - Columbia, Brown, Penn, Dartmouth, Cornell, Duke, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, Rice, WUSTL, Tufts, Carnegie Mellon, Emory, NYU, Boston University (data from Common Data Set or school publications). Accessed on Wikipedia “Early Decision” page on December 3, 2020
ED application numbers nearly doubled in the past decade. Students feel pressure to apply ED because it’s yet another college arms race incentive that aids universities at the expense of a student’s flexibility. ED requires a substantial degree of maturity and foresight about what their future selves want. Most know they won’t stand a chance at a given university unless they attempt an ED application, so they cave in to the temptation and hope for the best. Jeffrey Selingo in Who Gets in and Why argues that “few things have contributed as much to the insanity of the admissions process” as Early Decision.[i]
Applying ED produces a hidden opportunity cost where students applying for long-shot universities wait until they hear whether they gained admission or not, leaving many scrambling in late December after receiving bad news. If we had a centralized college application and admissions system like the UK’s ranked preferences, or residency matching for American medical students, then the system could more efficiently distribute spaces to applicants.
An all-or-nothing ED option for a single school incentivizes students to game the system by finding a school that admits at ED rates substantially higher than their RD rate. Cornell admitted almost 23 percent of their ED applicants compared with 9 percent for regular decisions. It’s questionable whether applying ED signals to universities that they’re a student’s genuine first choice. Dispensing with the pretense of their stated goal to match students with their top choice, some universities, such as U Chicago and Emory, offer Early Decision II with January deadlines. ED II allows rejected ED I students a second ED opportunity elsewhere. Universities likely don’t care whether a student opts for ED I or II as long as they arrive on campus, finish their degree, and pay their tuition.
James Fallows of the Atlantic wrote a damning 2001 article, “The Early-Decision Racket.” His observations ring as true today as two decades ago. He interviewed more than 30 public and private high school college counselors who all felt the negative outweighed the positive. “They had three basic complaints: that it distorts the experience of being in high school; that it worsens the professional-class neurosis about college admission; and that in terms of social class it is nakedly unfair.”
One student shared that “for the great majority, no. It makes things more stressful, more painful.” And this was 20 years ago when college admissions wasn’t quite so insane!
Fallows establishes a correlation in the 1990s between the increasing prominence of rankings systems like US News & World Report and a rise in ED practices. Perverse ranking incentives and society’s disproportionate focus on prestige produce unintended consequences where students pay the price. If a university admits half of their total enrollment through ED, it allows them to push down their overall admissions rate by rejecting a far larger portion of RD applicants.
Because acceptance rates are a heavily weighted criteria in rankings such as US News, that propels a university up the charts or maintains its position. He writes, “Today’s professional-class madness…that being accepted or rejected from a ‘good’ college is the most consequential fact about one’s education. Viewed from afar—or from close up, by people working in high schools—every part of this outlook is twisted.”
Less-selective universities have an incentive to give the impression of higher selectivity. Highly selective universities are not incentivized to ditch ED schemes for fear of appearing less prestigious and therefore ranked lower. Every campus has an added incentive to drive application numbers higher to select the highest-scoring SAT students further to bolster their US News standing, easier with ED when universities know the highest-scoring students must enroll.
Fallows references Penn and Swarthmore that depended on ED schemes in the ’90s to boost and eventually secure their prominence at the top of the US News leaderboard
The most controversial debate surrounding Early Decision involves a common theme: who gains access to spaces at elite American universities. Universities have debated whether to have binding ED options. A collective action problem means that if a critical mass of elite universities fails to dispense with ED practices, institutions that opt out will be punished in the rankings and their relative prestige. Harvard’s long-time admissions director William Fitzsimmons laments the ED arms race among elite universities: “In an ideal world, we would do away with all early programs.”
Fallows responds, referring to Harvard’s influence on admissions practices nationwide, that “his ‘ideal world’ is significant news. What holds him back is the need to know that other schools will lower their guns if he lowers his.” Fallows notes early reform efforts to cap an overall enrolling class admitted through ED at 25 percent. Still, the ED to RD ratio has been increasing ever since at more than 50 percent of enrolling students on some campuses.
The primary difference of Fallow’s article comparing then and now is that families and high school staff are acutely aware of ED and how it differs from nonbinding EA and RD choices. Navigating ED practices and options still heavily favors wealthy families in the know.
A winter 2006/2007 article in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education discussed the evolving ED landscape since Fallows’s 2001 article. Yale announced in late 2001 that if Harvard and Princeton discontinued their early deadlines, they would follow suit. Harvard discontinued their Early Action deadline for Fall 2008 applicants. They practiced nonbinding Early Action deadlines rather than binding ED deadlines because their yield hovered around 80 percent, the highest in the nation.
They lost few students to their peer institutions, so they were in a unique position to be the first mover to discard their early deadline. Harvard’s Interim President Derek Bok commented that “Students from more sophisticated backgrounds and affluent high schools often apply early to increase their chances of admission, while minority students and students from rural areas, other countries, and high schools with fewer resources miss out.”
Princeton and the University of Virginia followed suit and abandoned ED before adopting it again a few years later. It’s too tempting an enrollment management tool, so its practice outweighs the benefits of enrolling a diverse student body. The article notes that few universities followed Princeton and Harvard’s lead.
Let’s consider how early decision influences race and diversity in college admissions. A 2012 study by researchers at Claremont McKenna in the Journal of Law & Economics tested the hypothesis of whether ED promotes or deters enrolling diverse classes of students.. They surveyed 189 national universities and small liberal arts colleges from 2004–2007 and found that “ED has a negative impact on cohort diversity.” ED practices, unsurprisingly, yield significantly more white and out-of-state applicants. “The most pronounced negative effects are for Asian American and Hispanic students…. Their representation decreases more as schools increase their reliance on ED and/or EA programs.”
Even for universities that publicly commit to need-blind admissions, researchers suggest that universities have an incentive to admit slightly below-average students through ED. The latter are more likely to pay full tuition. The researchers hypothesize that increasing tuition prices are driven in part by ED practices that bind some portion of their enrolling class to pay full price. Universities can charge more for their services.
Moreover, because ED enrollees occupy increasingly higher proportions of spaces, fewer spaces remain for the significantly more competitive RD applicants. If universities admitted a lower proportion of ED students, the researchers’ economic models suggest that would leave more spaces for academically strong yet still below average underrepresented students.
However, pressures to maximize control over enrollment management outweigh administrative priorities for maximizing diversity recruitment. Subsequent recent findings by Inside Higher Ed and the left-leaning Center for American Progress report the same conclusions as the Claremont McKenna 2004–2007 ED survey. Consequently, most universities, most of the time, will admit more students through ED at the expense of underrepresented populations.
The two key takeaways from this discussion of Early Decision practices is that universities use them to exercise more control over enrollment management. Prioritizing enrollment management reduces every applicant’s flexibility, and it compromises liberal universities with public goals of enrolling the most diverse classes possible. Only the most highly exceptional students are likely to benefit from ED practices. The costs of early decision outweigh the benefits on a society level.
If elite universities were responsible stewards of educational services, they would forgo early decision practices to be more accountable to the public.
