When the Supreme Court overturned race-conscious admissions earlier this year, it forced colleges to reconsider many of the practices used to screen applicants. Almost immediately after the ruling became public, preferences for legacy applicants and the children of donors came under fire, including by President Biden.
Now colleges and critics are turning their attention to early decision, which has also been maligned for favoring affluent, well-connected students.
Students apply for early decision in the fall of their senior year. They agree to delay submitting other applications and usually receive a decision before Christmas. Students apply without knowing whether the college will be able to offer them a sufficient aid package to attend.
If the student is admitted and receives an adequate financial-aid package, they attend. If they are rejected, or, in some instances, the financial-aid package isn’t sufficient, the student can apply elsewhere.
Fifty-six percent of selective colleges offer early decision, according to a 2019 study by the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
But opposition to early decision is growing. In the spring of 2023, lawmakers in New York introduced a bill that would prohibit the use of early decision (and legacy admissions) at public and private colleges in the state. It’s the second time in two years such a bill has been introduced. This most recent bill didn’t make it past committee.
Last month, Wake Forest University didn’t end early decision so much as create a dedicated pathway for first-generation students to use the option. The university introduced a nonbinding early-action program for first-generation students. Like other highly selective institutions, Wake Forest has become increasingly reliant on early decision. More than half of the 2022 freshman class were admitted early.
Meanwhile, Virginia Tech decided to end early decision entirely, a move university officials say was driven by lack of appeal among students from families of more-modest means.
“What we heard from students, and especially students from low-income backgrounds, is that early decision was an option that was provided by Virginia Tech but not something that was accessible to them,” said Juan Espinoza, associate vice provost for enrollment management and director of undergraduate admissions.
How can you make a decision about an institution when they present you with a decision and nothing about what you will receive in aid?
About 40 percent of Virginia Tech’s student body is either the first person in their immediate family to attend college; of a racial or ethnic minority; of modest means; a veteran; or falls into more than one or all of these categories. Early decision has never favored students from these backgrounds, making the move to abandon the practice much less fraught for Virginia Tech than for other colleges.
Early decision allows colleges to not only properly gauge class sizes, which can dictate faculty and staff sizes, it also allows colleges to create class schedules and informs college housing plans. It is used to recruit top students, many of whom demand the practice.
“Early decision is a wonderful enrollment tool, but it is not in the best interest of the students,” Espinoza said. “As a land-grant institution that serves working-class Virginians, we need to serve everyone in the state.”
But even as Espinoza and the admissions team at Virginia Tech strive for more-equitable access into one of the top public colleges in the state, the appeal of early decision and how it often tips the chances of entry in favor of those who can afford to apply early has made it a mainstay in the admission marketplace.
In the 1950s, starting at Amherst College, in Massachusetts, a group of liberal-arts colleges began experimenting with the idea of allowing students to apply as early as the fall of their senior year. Ivy League institutions soon followed. By 1976 Brown, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale Universities offered students an estimate of their chances at admissions, while the rest of the Ivy League colleges adopted an all but binding agreement between student and college.
That decision — whether to admit and what the aid package looks like — usually comes just before Christmas. This admissions decision is often binding, meaning students who apply early find themselves on lists shared between colleges. Applying early to two colleges can result in being rejected by both, and backing out of a binding early-decision commitment can hurt the student’s chances in the general application pool.
Complicating this decision is the lack of financial transparency on the part of the college. Students apply, often with no idea how much aid they are going to receive from the college if accepted. However, some colleges, like the University of Virginia, allow students who are admitted and can demonstrate that the financial-aid package is insufficient to back out of the commitment.
For decades, students admitted via early decision remained a relatively small number of all admitted students. That changed in the early 1990s.
The advantages baked into early decision won’t go away simply by ending the practice.
Harvard typically received 2,000 early-decision applicants per year in the 1980s, and accepted about 100 of them. Nearly a decade later, the number of applicants seeking to get in early ballooned. Early decision doubled to 4,000 applicants each year by the early ‘90s, and the number of acceptances grew to 1,000 by 1995 — accounting for half of the incoming freshman class. America’s oldest college wasn’t alone. In 2015, about 60 percent of the incoming class at Davidson College, in North Carolina, came through early decision, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. At Duke University, 47 percent of the freshman class came through early decision, and the University of Pennsylvania admitted more than half of its freshman class through the practice.
As early decision became widespread, it left an indelible mark on the admissions landscape.
College admissions has two distinct types of players, said Christopher Norio Avery, an economist at the Harvard Kennedy School of Public Policy, “kids who approached this from an economic approach,” meaning those who see admissions as a game and know early decision offers the best odds of winning, and often can afford to go to the college regardless of the aid package, and “kids who just applied.” The latter group doesn’t see admissions as a game.
“The kids who came from a well-connected private school who had great counseling knew more about the system,” said Avery, an author of The Early Admissions Game: Joining the Elite (2004), which he wrote with Andrew Fairbanks and Richard Zeckhauser.
By the fall of their senior year, these students, typically white and affluent, knew where to apply and were prepared to make a decision on college earlier.
The other subset of kids, typically poorer and from minority groups, often lack counseling, connections to alumni, or highly educated parents. Many attend underserved schools where gathering the information to apply early is often a struggle.
“Those kids have limited information about how the system works,” Avery said. “They didn’t play the same game as their more-affluent peers.”
The information gap between the affluent and the poor, white and minority, leads disadvantaged students to gamble less frequently on early decision. And that comes with consequences. Avery’s book looks at both early decision and nonbinding early action, in which the applicant can back out if the aid package doesn’t suffice or if the applicant receives a better offer from another college.
While some selective colleges have enough endowment money to defray the cost of attending for a large swath of applicants, many colleges are not so fortunate. Wesleyan University, according to its president, Michael S. Roth, relies on student tuition for the bulk of its annual operating budget.
Applying through either early decision or early action gives students a 20 to 30 percentage point increase in being accepted, compared to those who don’t apply early. According to Avery, that’s the equivalent of scoring 100 points higher on the SAT.
By the time general admissions begins, there are fewer available seats and more applicants. Take the University of Pennsylvania. Nearly a quarter of early-decision candidates are accepted, which is more than twice the total acceptance rate.
Lower-income students are “not playing the game,” said Will Del Pilar, senior vice president at the Education Trust, because they have to decide on the college before knowing how to pay for it. And that has racial implications, Del Pilar added. “Because we know there is a Black-white wealth gap, how can you make a decision about an institution when they present you with a decision and nothing about what you will receive in aid?”
Colleges have tried to move away from early-decision policies, only to backtrack. In the early 2000s, college presidents began to speak out against the practice. Richard C. Levin, who was president of Yale then, openly criticized early decision. “If we all got rid of it, it would be a good thing. It pushes the pressure of thinking about college back into the junior year of high school, and the only one who benefits is the admissions officers,” Levin told The New York Times in 2001.
However, he balked at ending early decision at Yale, noting it would put the university at a distinct disadvantage against its Ivy League peers.
Colleges need to build closer ties with high schools that don’t traditionally send students to selective institutions.
Still, a few colleges did away with early decision for the reasons Levin mentioned. Harvard scrapped the practice in 2006. Five years later, Harvard brought it back.
The University of Virginia followed a similar path. After ending early decision in 2006 out of concern that it privileged more-affluent students, it reinstated the practice in 2019.
Another reason for the reversal? At the time that Yale’s president was criticizing early decision, and Harvard and UVA ended the practice, a dramatic change in college rankings was sweeping through the industry, making it even more difficult to end the practice.
In 2003, U.S. News & World Report began to measure yield: the percentage of admitted students who actually attend a college. Early decision is one way to identify students who are most enthusiastic about attending their top-choice college. And since early decision locks students into attending an institution, colleges could remain selective about who attends and maintain higher yields.
“There are kids who apply early to Yale and don’t get in and come here, and that’s great,” said Roth, of Wesleyan. The university’s early-decision process is binding. “But there is something about someone who decides our college is their top choice. I like having students who feel a connection and fondness for the school.”
Ending early decision at Virginia Tech is part of a larger effort at the university to make admissions more equitable. In 2018, the school moved to the Common Application. Students who needed an application fee waiver no longer needed to enter their parents or guardians’ income. Instead, the university asks if the student receives free lunch, and if the student does, the fee is waived.
The university also allows students to self-report their grades, rather than submit a complete transcript at the time of application, which can be burdensome for students from poorly resourced schools. Virginia Tech verifies the grades later in the admissions process. The university has also introduced a nonbinding early-action option. The result has been a rise in students from low-income and minority families. Black enrollment rose from 4 percent in 2017 to almost 9 percent in 2022. (Black people account for 18 percent of the state’s population.)
While early decision accounts for almost half of the students admitted each year at Harvard, it accounts for less than 20 percent of students admitted each year at Virginia Tech. In short, Virginia Tech doesn’t rely heavily on early decision and therefore finds it easier to discard.
Avery points out that the advantages baked into early decision won’t go away simply by ending the practice.
“Let’s imagine someone waving a magic wand and some regulator says no one can have early decision. Superficially early decision advantages certain people,” Avery said. “But there are a lot of schools who have regular conversations with a college and know how to communicate with an admissions office.”
Those counselors, students, and affluent families will still use alumni connections and other relationships to tip the process in their favor. Meanwhile, Avery warns, those with fewer connections might be at an even greater disadvantage without a formal early-decision process.
“Getting rid of early decisions, no matter how superficially good it seems, can give well-connected students even more advantage,” he said. Eliminating the practice at “a lot of high schools can create an informal process that wouldn’t be available to everyone.”
If early decision is here to stay, what can be done to reform it? One idea is to limit the number of students admitted under the practice. UVA, for instance, typically offers admissions to about 9,000 students each year, but only 10 percent of them are early-decision applicants. Meanwhile, Stanford University offers an aid calculator that students can use before applying.
Wesleyan works with Prep for Prep and QuestBridge, national groups focused on improving minority enrollment in college. The liberal-arts university, located in suburban Connecticut, also has strong ties with community groups in the Bronx and the American southwest to get students into its early-decision tract. Roth believes colleges need to build closer ties with high schools that don’t traditionally send students to selective institutions.
“The inequities aren’t only in the admissions process, but in the schools they attend,” he said.
