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The Early Applicant Gets the Confetti

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Applying early decision is like getting to a club before party-o-clock: it’s a little bit easier to get in, but you have to be ok deciding where to go early.[1] Now, imagine if, once you decided where you wanted to go clubbing—this really is a clumsy analogy—you weren’t allowed to leave. Early decision plans are typically binding, which means students who are accepted early decision can’t change their minds a few months later.

Institutions like early decision because, like clubs, the more committed consumers they attract early on, the less they have to worry about meeting revenue targets and the more people they get to turn away. Let’s say College X has a target freshman class size of 300 students. They’re able to admit 150 students through early decision. Each early decision student has a likely yield of 100%, which is to say that 1 student admitted in early decision translates to 1 student enrolled. In the regular decision process, yield is far less predictable. Maybe College X thinks it will yield 1 out of every 4 students it admits in regular decision. With a predicted yield of 25%, College X has to admit 600 students to fill those final 150 spots. But, if College X could instead admit 200 students in early decision, they would only have to admit 400 students in regular decision.

Colleges’ Use of Early Decision to Fill Their Freshman Class

With the nifty Common Data Set (CDS) as my source, I gathered statistics about the 2012-2013 admission cycle at 198 schools in the top 3 categories of Barron’s 2012 selectivity. After dropping schools that don’t have an early decision option, refused to report their early decision admission statistics, or did not make their current CDS accessible, 99 schools remain. While there are a number of interesting stories to tell and hypothetical questions to ask, most of the institutions fall into one (or both) of two categories:

  • Accept the majority of students who apply Early Decision. Of the 99 institutions, 51 accepted more than 50% of their ED applicants.
  • Fill the plurality of the class through Early Decision. Of the 99 institutions, 41 filled more than 40% of their freshman class through early decision.

Because I’m interested in the use of early decision as a lever to decrease the overall acceptance rate, I then narrowed the list to only those institutions that accepted fewer than 50% of all applicants (73 out of 99).[2] Of those 73, 27 had early decision acceptance rates that exceeded 50%. At some schools, like Oberlin College, the difference between the early decision acceptance rate and the overall acceptance rate was more than 25 percentage points (61% early versus 30% regular). To help illustrate the benefit that institutions receive and the squeezing out that regular decision applicants feel, look at the break-down of acceptances and rejections at Oberlin College, where over a third of last year’s freshmen were accepted through early decision.

Oberlin College

This same comparison gets even more dramatic when we look at highly selective (and slightly larger) institutions like Columbia University. Because Columbia receives a significant number of applications in both early decision and regular decision, they’re able to minimize acceptance rates in both while still filling a significant portion of their freshman class through early decision. Columbia filled 45% of its freshman class that way—and only had to accept 20% of early decision applicants to do so! The same goes for other highly selective institutions with early decision options, such as Pomona and Vanderbilt.

Columbia University

 

What about the Waitlist?

Back in April, I took to the CDS to examine institutions’ use of the waitlist. The resulting narrative lent support to anecdotal evidence I collected as an admission counselor: institutions use the waitlist as a soft deny for some students and a just-in-case for others. Waitlisting a student shelters the institution from yield volatility while having a minimal impact on both the admission selectivity and the academic profile of accepted students. Armed with these new statistics on early decision, I returned to that waitlist data to compare the findings at select institutions:

  • The University of Richmond waitlisted 42% of its applicants last year. In a nice moment of symmetry, the university filled 42% of its freshman class through early decision.
  • Bates College waitlisted 40% of its applicants last year, and filled 55% of its class through early decision.
  • My alma mater, Reed College, waitlisted 20% of applicants, and filled 32% of its class through early decision.

In their effort to maximize tuition revenue without sacrificing selectivity and reputation, colleges are relying on policies like early decision and the waitlist to make the admission cycle work in their favor.

 

This sounds like a good thing for applicants, right?

The unfortunate side-effect of these trends is that students feel pressured to apply early decision somewhere. I heard these stories while an admission counselor: “I’m not really settled on College X, but I think I’ll get in if I apply early decision.” The go-where-your-heart-takes-you Socratically-trained admission counselor in me cringes at this. But, having talked with hundreds of students across the nation, I totally get it. For the students and families who are wrapped up in the selective college admission cycle, it can feel like a mind game. Of course, if every high school senior applying to these institutions decided that early decision was the way to go, the trends wouldn’t hold.

More importantly, these trends work against students who come from low-income families or attend high schools with limited resources. For those students, applying early decision may not be in the cards. Maybe they haven’t had the opportunity to take the SAT or ACT once, not to mention multiple times. And, for aid-eligible students, applying to one school without the option to compare and contrast financial aid packages is a huge risk. (Especially when you consider that colleges dole out merit aid in a careful effort to sway undecided students. In that context, why would any college use merit aid dollars on early decision applicants?) While schools with early decision policies typically allow students to break the commitment in instances where the financial aid isn’t sufficient, we shouldn’t really get into the habit of putting students in the awful position of falling in love with a school only to find out later that it’s financially out of reach.

Analyzing these data is my way of bringing clarity to a process typically cloaked in mystery. But these trends shouldn’t incite a call to action. Selective colleges and universities have plenty of areas where they could—and I would argue must—improve. The percentage of students who are Pell Grant recipients, for one. Changing waitlist policies or early decision practices won’t ensure more Pell students gain admission, unless institutions also make an active commitment to expanding their financial aid budgets. And even then, they educate just a small fraction of the students enrolled in higher education. Instead, my hope is that, in better understanding how institutions use admission policies to their advantage, we can begin to erase their mystery. Whether they successfully deliver a quality education is a far more important question than how successfully they drive down their acceptance rate.

 

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[1] I think this is how clubs work?

[2] Note that, because of the way CDS asks the question, these overall rates aggregate all students across the application options.


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