It’s that time of year again, when students across the country anxiously await the delivery of specially wrapped packages: early admission letters.
The institutions that offer early decision—pathways that increase an applicant’s chance of acceptance but usually require them to commit if they get in—are almost exclusively highly selective. They’ve been admitting a growing share of their classes early, and this fall is no exception.
Brown University admitted a record number of early-decision applicants—906 students, compared to last year’s 898—with an acceptance rate of 18 percent, its highest in six years. But fewer students applied early to Brown, a change that admissions dean Logan Powell attributed in part to the reinstatement of test score requirements. Yale University, which uses the nonbinding “single-choice early action” instead of early decision, also received fewer early applications this year than last: 6,729 compared to 7,856 in 2023, a drop of about 17 percent. And yet they admitted more of them: 728, compared to last year’s 709.
By contrast, Duke University, which retained its test-optional policy, received more early applications than ever this year: 6,627, an 8 percent increase over 2023, when 11 percent—or 736 students—were accepted. That built on a massive 30 percent increase in early applicants between 2022 and 2023.
About one in eight higher ed institutions offers early decision, the vast majority of them selective liberal arts colleges; only a handful are public universities. Critics say the practice gives a leg up to wealthy applicants; you have to be sure you can pay for a college, the critique goes, in order to commit to a binding acceptance offer.
The data backs up that view: Students attending private high schools are three and a half times more likely to apply early decision than those at public schools, according to a 2022 report by Education Reform Now. Opponents of early decision argue that many colleges use early decision as a way to lock in a certain number of high-paying students, assuring a base level of tuition revenue for the following year.
The truth may be more complicated. James Murphy, director of career pathways and postsecondary policy at Education Reform Now and the author of the 2022 report, was staunchly opposed to early-admissions pathways just a few years ago. Now he’s more ambivalent.
“I started in the camp of, ‘Early decision is evil, we have to get rid of it.’ That it was no better—and some people would say it’s worse—than legacy [preferences],” Murphy said. “But I don’t think we have enough data to accurately assess the cost and benefit of early decision. I think the only thing that’s clear is that it can be used for both good and bad.”
He still thinks admissions would be a more even playing field without early decision. But in a post–affirmative action world, he said he’s come to see its potential benefits as well—not just for colleges, but for underrepresented students.
Christoph Guttentag, Duke’s dean of admissions, said he sees early decision as a key tool for building a class that’s diverse along multiple axes: socioeconomic, racial, geographic, even extracurricular. Admissions officers have more freedom to admit a virtuoso violinist or star basketball player early, he said, and the same goes for applicants from underserved communities who stand out despite lacking the resources of many of their peers.
“Because it’s a smaller pool and we know we’re going to admit more of them, we can be a bit more flexible when considering applicants who are appealing in many different ways,” Guttentag said. “It’s an opportunity to, when we can, create more economic diversity on campus.”
Just How Unfair Is Early Decision?
Last August, in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action, colleges announced a slew of admissions policy changes meant to counter the decision’s effects on diversity, from abolishing legacy preferences to boosting community college transfers. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, familiarly known as Virginia Tech, went one step further and eliminated early decision.
“It was definitely serving a more affluent population,” Juan Espinoza, Virginia Tech’s vice president for enrollment management, told Inside Higher Ed. “We wanted to be sure that Virginia Tech applicants didn’t feel there were paths to admission that were closed off to them because of their background.”
Robert Massa, a veteran enrollment manager and co-founder of the consulting firm Enrollment Intelligence Now, said eliminating early decision would be “largely symbolic” for most colleges.
“What colleges should be doing is investing more in recruiting students from underrepresented communities to apply, and apply early when they can,” he said.
Massa also thinks that the narrative around early decision—that it’s exclusively for rich students—has been something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. For middle-income families looking to shop around for the best financial aid or scholarship offer, Massa said, early decision would close off some options. But for low-income students, tuition is almost sure to be highly discounted at the selective colleges that offer ED—and if it isn’t cheap enough, they can always bow out.
“It’s a very unfortunate misunderstanding that students are going to be forced to attend a college they can’t afford, and it’s amazing to me that this myth has proliferated so much,” he said. “If more underrepresented minority students understood that the rewards far outweigh the risks, more would apply and more would get in.”
Guttentag said that’s been his experience at Duke, too.
“I understand families’ hesitancy … but if you know you want to come, and you apply ED, it’s my experience that very few students who get in can’t attend for financial reasons,” he said. “That’s why I feel comfortable encouraging students from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds to apply early.”
‘A Fantastic Enrollment Tool’
Guttentag said he’s tried to strike a comfortable balance between wielding early decision as an enrollment tool and relying too heavily on it to fill seats. In 2023, Duke admitted 40 percent of its class through early decision, down from 54 percent the previous year.
“There’s a limit to the number of students we feel comfortable admitting through early decision,” he said. “It goes up and down in a range, but I think in the past five years most colleges have found their comfort zone.”
Massa retired as the vice president of enrollment management for Dickinson College, a small private liberal arts school in Pennsylvania. Dickinson belongs to a subset of institutions that rely especially heavily on early decision; in 2023–24, nearly half of its incoming class was admitted early.
At a subset of small liberal arts colleges, that limit is much higher. In 2021, Bates College admitted 81 percent of its incoming class through early decision, and it continues to be among the most reliant on the practice; last fall, 67 percent of the incoming class were admitted early. Sixty-nine percent of Middlebury College’s Class of 2027 were early-decision admits, as were 67 percent at Grinnell College and 66 percent at Emory University.
At these colleges, the strategic advantage of applying early is obvious. Bates’s overall acceptance rate in 2022 was about 14 percent; for early-decision applicants, it was 47 percent. At Emory, an applicant’s chances of admission double when they apply early decision.
Murphy said the universities with the highest early-decision admit rates are frequent “second choices,” backup schools for applicants casting a wide net among selective colleges. If students have to commit, institutions’ yield rates are sure to increase, meaning less uncertainty when planning and budgeting for the next year.
Tulane University, for instance, began offering early decision in 2017, through which it admitted 26 percent of its class; by 2022 that number had ballooned to 68 percent. Washington University in St. Louis admitted 62 percent of its class through early decision in 2022, up from just 35 percent in 2016.
It’s not only a rise in applications driving the upward march of early-decision admits. As coming demographic declines threaten big changes to college enrollment strategy, some colleges with lower yield rates may look to early decision as a way to reduce uncertainty and ensure tuition revenue, both Guttentag and Massa said.
Virginia Tech used to admit an average of 20 percent of its classes through early action, lower than most but still significant. Espinoza said working without that tool has been something of a challenge—especially as students apply to more colleges, making yield rates less predictable.
“It’s a fantastic enrollment tool, there’s no denying that,” he conceded. “Trying to predict what 17- and 18-year-olds are going to do is challenging enough, and to have something in the toolbox that helps remove some of that uncertainty makes it really hard to move away from.”
Still, Espinoza said he has no regrets.
“I’m glad I did it,” he said. “We’re not exactly where we want to be with all our metrics, but I think it’s a step in the right direction. And at the end of the day, from an equity standpoint, I feel it was the right thing to do.”