Early Decision Is Becoming More Popular
There are a number of benefits to Early Decision (ED) applications. In case you’re not familiar, when a student decides to apply ED, they submit their applications earlier than Regular Decision (RD) students, generally by November 1. In turn, the school either accepts, rejects, or defers the student by mid-December, months before the RD students learn their fate. Over the past few years, many top schools have reported receiving record-breaking numbers of ED applications.
Take Barnard College, for example. For the Class of 2027, the college received 1,671 ED applications. This shows an 11% increase over the Class of 2026, which was a 17% increase over the year prior. In both years, Barnard was able to fill 60% of their available slots with ED students. This benefits the college, because ED acceptances are binding. What this means is that students who are accepted into the college under Early Decision are required to attend. By accepting a larger number of ED students, the school is now sure that they will fill all of their open slots, ensuring that they will receive the tuition required for this year’s funding.
But Barnard is far from the only college seeing the number of early applications increase. Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale have also noted a significant bump in early applicants. And this is just to name a few. Early Decision (as well as Early Action) is more popular than ever with more students submitting their applications early and hoping for the best. The process, however, is not without criticism.
The most common criticism is that ED programs significantly benefit students from wealthier backgrounds. After all, many ED applications are due before a student is informed of their financial aid offerings. If a student from a low-income household applies ED to a college or university and is accepted, there is no guarantee that the student will be able to pay for tuition. Students from wealthier backgrounds, on the other hand, are much less concerned with financial aid packages and are therefore more likely to apply in the ED round. In fact, according to Common Data Set reports, “Students from the wealthiest zip codes are twice as likely to apply Early Decision. International students are three times as likely to apply Early Decision. Those who attend private schools are three and a half times as likely to apply early as their public school counterparts.” So it’s not a perfect system.
Historically, colleges and universities would fill roughly 20-30% of their incoming class with ED students. But as that number rises, so does the competition. At Ivy Link, we strongly encourage students to apply ED, if possible. If colleges had responded to the influx of Early applicants by continuing to fill less than 50% of their incoming class with ED applicants, then the Early acceptance rate would likely have crept closer to the Regular Decision rate, and we’d be having a very different conversation. But that would be bad business for these colleges. Why risk students turning down your offer when there are plenty who are willing to immediately commit? Thus, as it stands, students still have a significantly higher chance at acceptance if they apply ED.
If you’re not sure if Early Decision is right for you, check out our Early Action & Early Decision blog post that can help you decide. If you have further questions, please contact one of our advisors to provide answers.
